I agree that there's a need to balance the now and planning for the future, and an awful lot of start ups seem, at least to me, to get the balance badly wrong.
But there are often sacrifices you need to do now to gain far bigger rewards in the future. Whether that's resisting that dessert sat in front of you because you want to be 50lbs lighter, saving money now so that you don't starve in retirement, or sometimes trading off time with the family for time spent working so that you've still got a job or a company in 5 years time.
If I've learned anything, it's that the really important things you're talking about—those get done. They have my focus for most of every day, and I care deeply about them. I don't let them hit the floor.
The things that are missed are the ones I put out of mind to do that; that are broader than my current focus, more long-term, and especially, the things that are more human and soft. The long-range planning, the investment in systems to make my work more effective and less of a hamster-wheel, and the investment of time in life itself and the things that make me feel like myself, and make me truly inspired and motivated to to better work with the time I have.
It is these things that I forget as I'm trying to work harder and "do the right thing" for my future and my company's future. Ironically, the very things that would help its success most are the ones that fly out the window as soon as the going gets tough. That's why keeping this balance is so incredibly difficult, and incredibly important.
Your company needs a human, not a machine. It needs someone who is sane and effective every day, consistently, without fail. And if you're leading a group, multiply that importance by the number of people in it, because they will all be affected by your imbalance more than you will.
This is one of the kernels of Zen, by the way. The harder you try to hit the target, the further away your arrow lands. Success is not all about pure effort.
My hypothesis about your anecdotal examples is that they were probably missing something else. There are so many things. Or, their lack of investment in their company was not, in fact, balance, but simply lack of care or attention. They are not the same.
And if I've learned anything by looking at obesity, people stuck in an ever downward spiral of payday loans, people who never saved for their pensions etc, they frequently don't.
> Ironically, the very things that would help its success most are the ones that fly out the window as soon as the going gets tough.
Indeed. That's a great example of companies living for the now. "Who cares about whether my employee will be off with stress in a month's time? That's the future and I'll let future me worry about that. I need this bit of work out now."
Like I say, and I think you're agreeing, it's about balance. What it's not about (which is what I was challenging) is always living for the now.
To the examples you listed, I'd say it is extremely important to look at systems and their effects on individual behavior. There's a reason those problems are epidemic and not just outliers. The same goes for management and poor work/life balance: people don't make these types of decisions in absence of influence, and as leaders we have the ability and responsibility to understand that influence.
"Now" is a "rolling window". Lost 'nows" also agrregate.
Why would you need to cook dinner or water a garden (who even has a garden) or even have children in the first place? People have been doing that for thousands of years. If you want to scratch dirt you can move to Kansas and be a dirt farmer. Plenty of time with your kids with that career track.
If you're building a company, you have almost no time to do anything. Building a company is a very difficult task that very few people can successfully execute, and even fewer can successfully execute in the limit. It's just intrinsically hard.
In comparison, cooking dinner or putting the hose on some lettuce or some anemic tomato plants is easy as balls. They pay people pennies an hour to do those things for you. You can just pay them to do them, and do interesting, hard things yourself.
Personally, I think preferring easy things to hard things is a sign of weakness. Doing hard things is fulfilling. Cash is incidental, but it is a very good metric of how hard something is. If you are not making very much money, you aren't doing things that are very hard.
Life is, truly, very short. You can spend it doing hard things and, if you die, know that you were able to go further and faster and better than all the people around you, that you've won, or you can die knowing that you did the same boring things people did since they were barely past apes.
And if you say that farming and parenting are easy, then we know two things about you:
(1) You call the things that you value "hard." (2) You've never farmed or raised a child.
You also clearly believe in an afterlife ("if you die, [you can] know..."); and you believe in one that looks something like a throne from which you can gaze down on your own and others' accomplishments. These two ideas may well have some truth to them, but neither are guaranteed.
Frankly, it's strange to me that in a society in which we are constantly exposed to the memoirs, memories, junkets, and essays of the roundly accomplished, we still think they are any happier than anyone else. Surely some must be or must have been, but I don't know of any confessors. I have heard plenty admit to dissatisfaction, to put it mildly. I hope you don't run into the same trap that many do.
The only thing I agree with you on is that I, too, am a misanthrope in even some of my best hours. I just don't think any more highly of myself for the fact.
Still, I would be proud to have made a better world for the people I do care about--and would even be happy with this George Eliot line for an epitaph, although the pronouns don't map quite right:
"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."
Life is truly very short, I think everybody's going to agree on that. You can spend your limited time turning it into a competition where you look down on "dirt farmers" for the weakness inherent in them that leads them to make food which allows you to survive, or you can figure that some people aren't worth competing with and find things that make you happy.
Congratulations; you're probably going to go "further and faster and better" than I am. But I've got a job I love, I'm early in my career, I'm married to a woman I'm crazy in love with, and every evening I'm happy to fall asleep, every morning I'm excited to start my day. It's hard for me to see how I could be doing much better than that. Hopefully your categorical victory over me will give you some time to take a break, you sound like you need it.
This is the just world fallacy. How much people earn isn't analogous to how hard they work, how important their work is or how challenging. It's a product of supply and demand.
Yes, life is truly, very short. And in both cases, when all the people who knew you themselves die, you'll be completely forgotten. So you can spend life being happy or you can spend it being miserable. And when you die, it won't matter either way.
You don't get to say "haha, I won". There is no past tense to death. You're going to die and you're going to cease to be. That's it.
And nobody will thank you for the things you do. Even if--in the exceedingly rare case somewhere did--you won't know it.
And who knows, maybe you're all a figment of my imagination and the universe itself ceases to exist around me when I die. What then about all my achievements? What will I do with my degree and my money and my wife and my car and my house and my whatever when the universe ceases to exist?
NOTHING. That's the point. Nothing.
You think you are so big, but you are so small. You are just as small as the rest of us. And there is nothing you can do about it.
Once you've had the kids, however, I'd suggest that most startups (perhaps not absolutely all) are objectively less important than making sure your kids grow up to be decent, empathetic, constructive members of society – for whatever definition of society you choose. It may be tough for your kid to grow up to change everyone's world, but it's really easy to let one grow up to destroy someone's world, and preventing that is the job you took on when you decided to take the step of having a child that may one day interact with mine.
Yeah, it is. And you can't take your money with you. Your startup might be the next Facebook. It also might fail in six weeks time leaving you with nothing.
The fact that you define life success in terms of whether you won against other people guarantees one thing: you will lose. There will always be someone above you that you can stress and obsess over beating. Or, you can decide you want none of it and find success on your own terms.
I echo the other poster that described your mentality as "simple". In other situations I'd consider that a little too insulting to say, but you've already described people who focus on anything other than "hard" things as "weak". Truly complex people get fulfillment from a variety of sources. Cooking, gardening, spending time with a loved one, whatever. Success is not the only metric for most of us.
I agree with the parent of this comment that it takes a life to learn how to live. If you want to live the life of a founder, live that life. I have found great joy in different aspects of life.
I think some people (you, obviously) are motivated by difficult tasks. Some are motivated by other kinds of difficult tasks (even ones that have been done for 1000s of years, like farming--a very difficult task, trust me!). Some people are motivated by learning, some by activism, etc, etc.
Amen, I'm 34 and for the first time in my life when exposed to unexpected complexity from life I don't retreat back into a set of circumstances that allow me to control the situation (i.e. throw myself into work and minimise all distractions).
I had a fairly horrible (if not unusual) upbringing so I fear messy complex life situations, I deliberately live a Spartan existence (I don't drink, smoke, do drugs or socialise that much (outside the local developer meet up and odd cycle club event)) but I'm working at it, reducing life to a problem simplified enough to be solved is one coping strategy but as I'm starting to realise there are others, my business partner is a Buddhist and while I'm not in the slightest religious I find much of the foundation interesting particulary acceptance and mindfulness.
24 year old me would have never even stopped to question what he was doing, 10 years can make a hell of a difference.
What exactly has been won here? There have probably been ultra-driven people for as long as people have been cooking or gardening or "scratching dirt." Being ultra-driven and ambitious is probably as boring and quotidian as any of those other things.
All of us die, it is usually unremarkable, and after a while no one remembers. You're optimizing so that you spend most of your life doing the things that seems most meaningful to you. Those people who are having children and watering gardens are probably doing the same. Each type of person can do that without condescending to the other type of person.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/
Please do not act as if 100% of the things you do on a daily basis are "hard" things. You're commenting on HN, so I know you are not 100% tapped on the hard things.
I believe that the author chose to use the example of cooking as a way to do a relaxing (easy) thing that doesn't need a whole lot of brain power.
If you‘re doing something for money so that you can live your life the way you want later, that doesn‘t work because it takes time to learn to live your life the way you want. Typically it takes a lifetime to do that, so you must start early: you must start now if you wish to make it. Otherwise you‘ll end up with a lot of cash and no idea of what kind of life makes you fulfilled.
If you‘re doing something to make a difference – or to make the world a better place – then if you feel like you‘re running out of time then you‘re probably doing it wrong. That sort of goals are rarely if ever such undertakings that are constrained by time. Paradoxically, life is short yet there‘s always plenty of time so as to not have to hurry things. If you work madly for a few years what is it that you think you‘ll win from it if you compare doing that thing you can‘t not do for decades? Or maybe you weren‘t doing a thing you can‘t not do in the first place?
Rush is a sign that you have grown an inflated sense of importance. Nothing is that important, not even the important things.
If you‘re building a company, you have all the time to grow the business. Some families have been doing that for centuries, many individuals for decades. If you have a really great idea, take the time to work on it. If you‘re lucky, someone else does the same thing and finishes faster than you which means you don‘t have to do it at all! You can just enjoy the benefits of the addition of widget X or feature Y in the pool of things tangible in our lives. Maybe the idea wasn‘t that unique after all. But some ideas are and thosee you can work on for years. For many things in life, building them slower makes them last longer. Even a good relationship or a family tree.
For these reasons, I consider it a better approach to weave the things you can‘t not do and your life together. This removes a divide: life goes on at its own pace and along comes your calling but they‘re not in conflict. There‘s no contrast between work and family, or business and private life because everything is scattered around in the timeline of your life in small pieces. There‘s always some work but there‘s always home and family too. Neither is more important than the other and none of the areas can continuously hog a big chunk of your focus.
Daddy must work now, daddy has to write an important email because those people need daddy‘s opinion.
I can‘t have the meeting today, I need to cook dinner and water the garden with my daughter.