My solution - find what I enjoy working on, work on it 60 hours a week, and enjoy the other 40 hours a week with my girlfriend, traveling, playing my sports, learning beyond just what I do for work. I don't watch tv, I don't waste time on a lot of silly things, but I do enough that I have a healthy balance. He struggled to uninstall his video games and he is going to tell me that is a healthy life balance when it includes no time for friends, family, or a girlfriend? I would rather work on what I like for 40 years, and spend the whole time enjoying it along the way, than work really hard for 7 years and hate my life during and after that. Just the fact that you have a large bank account does NOT make you happy. It is what you do with it that MAY make you happy, but even then - there are a lot of ways to be happy with less money than you think.
1) 80 hours isn't always more productive than 60 hours of someone else's time, and in fact may be counter-productive.
2) What do you have to show for after 10 years of playing the startup lottery? In your best case: you probably have a huge bank account, but no life left at that point.
I think this deserves a separate discussion. I'll keep this in the back of my head and think it over, post up another response when the time's right. At either rate, it's cool to see your guys' feedback.
What I'm more concerned about is the fact that the guy said he tried a four-hour workweek but got bored, and now he wants to work 100-hour weeks so he can retire in seven years. What does he think he's going to do when he retires?
Now, if you and the author are talking about $10m company payday (lets say $1-2m for yourself), that's about a decade or two of decent income (ie, not enough to retire) and as you mentioned, what would someone used to working 100hr weeks and labeling relationships as "distractions" do with their time? I'm really failing to see the author's point to all this.
He's going to work 85-hour weeks, of course!
One major theme of The Four-Hour Workweek is that, for many people, it takes practice and training to do less work. You get habituated to the stress and the pressure, such that life without it begins to feel wrong. You need to train up the areas of your life that fall outside of your career, or they'll atrophy, and you won't be able to stop working because your mind and body will rebel.
Probably the guy will take a break for 6 months after/when he succeeds, then do it all over again. Or he'll start doing something else obsessively. Either way he's not going to be bored.
Everything in life is a risk, so it's better to try hard, make a real go of it, than to sit at the sidelines and never try.
That extra long hours speed the time to market is an illusion. It doesn't work. In the vast majority of projects, burnout hours are a direct result of a failure you can't admit to.
I'm not saying this only because I don't like sweatshops, it's because I have yet to see quality code from a sweatshop. When I've worked in sweatshops, I've found that the most productive people were never the ones working the longest hours; on the contrary, those of us who were smart enough to do our jobs and go home and get some rest ended up picking up the pieces from the all-night crew every morning.
The real truth is, that won't happen unless you hit a jackpot, so if you're actually banking on working 100hr weeks in startup, so you can relax later on, I suggest taking 30mins a week off and visiting the local lotto booth.