But the quality of energy will be different when you are shovelling the coal if YOU chose where the ship is going, if the dream of what lies on the other shore is yours. That vision (in your case, of starting your own business) is what fuelled your efforts, IMHO.
Why does he want to waste time on HN? Somewhere inside his heart is screaming a voice, "No, I don't want to do this". He's not lazy (CS top 10 school). It's just that the self-flagellation stops working for many people once they hit 20.
The difficulty is that the outer actions of someone like you (self-motivated) and someone like him (self-flagellating) may be the same. So the poor guy (or gal) tries to be like you and suffers.
The OP said: >>"CS degree from a top-10, worked at a startup and a large company, enough savings to last a few years of solo development."
Most of commenters on this site are software engineers — and this profession usually pays pretty well, to the point that we can safely assume that if the person is a capable software engineer, he has his basic needs provided for.
Which is why everyone must strive to have a side income/early retirement plan because you need to experience true freedom to enjoy things in life.
Once you have financial independence you can do anything you want, take unlimited vacations, learn music, go hiking, ride a motorcycle all day, heck you can even code all day and work on interesting projects without the fear of getting fired, denied a raise or whatever.
Work you like makes you happy, but not free.
Even if the actual act of coding (or painting, or martial arts, or writing, or watering roadside plants) is effortless, there's a hell of a lot of effort that goes into just getting yourself in a position to do it.
Example: perhaps painting is effortless for you, but putting yourself in a position to paint involves a lot of mundane things that require effort. You still have to buy and stretch canvasses. You have to buy a brush. You have to clean your brushes. If you want to make a career of it, you need to tackle some basic business tasks. You need to deal with an agent or gallery. You need to file your taxes, because painting gets a lot harder when you're in jail or the IRS has taken your stuff. You have to work and pay your rent, because it's tough to paint when you're homeless and worrying about your next meal and whether you'll survive the night. And so forth. There's a lot of shit that has to get done just to place yourself in a position where you can regularly put brush to canvas.
When I started my own business that was my experience. Writing the code was the fun part. Effortless, you might say. I was compelled to write it - it was harder to stay away from it than it was to work on it. But I went through hell just to be able to write that code - I worked long hours at my day job so that I could pay the bills, I often had to choose between writing code and having a social life, and so on. And prior to even starting that venture, it took me years of hard work and college education just to develop the skills that allowed me to write that code.
Your advice is, at best, useful only to those who already have their basic needs provided for. Trust-fund babies and the like.