This rhetoric furthered by Elon, Jack Ma and several others where working 7 days a week for 18 hours is "ideal" and that rest and relaxation are had at the expense of productivity/success is a real dangerous position.
You know what happens to the majority of people when they get to a state of anxiety when relaxing and not working? Stress and burnout.
Let's acknowledge that it may have been the path to success for SOME of the 0.1% who can work 18 hours a day nonstop for a decade with extreme natural ability and a fair amount of chance (confirmation bias aside) and not the end-all of being successful that everyone should strive for. Yes, there is certainly a correlation between working hard and being successful - regardless of your natural ability. Don't do it at the expense of living.
Take it to the extreme: what happens when EVERYONE works that hard? You're back at your normal level of relative productivity.
Some people do enjoy their work and can be said to live for it. Marissa Mayer had an interesting take that burnout wasn't necessarily about working too much but resentment that they'd rather be spending more time on something else (like family). To paraphrase a similar view someone once told me: there's no such thing as work/life balance, it's all just life.
That being said I think it's easier to live to work if you feel that your efforts are going to yield greater results. Putting time into study to get good grades and learn new skills, anticipating that this will yield better job opportunities? Sure! Working long hours on my startup that is taking off and could make me rich? Great! Having to work long hours and skip vacations to finish a project in a salaried corporate job? That'll burn you out because you're not directly benefitting from the sacrifice, which probably leads to some resentment towards your employer.
Yeah, that's the thing. It can be good to work hard, but not necessarily long hours, or long stretches without breaks. I never feel more productive than when I just got back from a vacation.
This is discussed in the article closer to the end, when it explains the balancing act of continuously recognizing the difference of productive, interesting work and tired, harmful work for the sake of work and showing off.
PG also uses himself as an example of how the type of work can impact actual productive hours: about 5 for programming/engineering and almost a full day for coordination and communication.
> SOME of the 0.1% who can work 18 hours a day nonstop for a decade with extreme natural ability
I'm sceptical of whether they actually exist as described tbh. There's an obvious incentive for rich business people to emphasize the amount of work they put in, and I've not seen any independent verification of their supposedly high output
Yeah, get back to me when someone is willing to put those claims to the most minimal of tests. It should be as simple as verifying claims of breatharianism, and the video evidence should be as entertaining, too.
You know what happens to the majority of people when they get to a state of anxiety when relaxing and not working? Stress and burnout.
Let's acknowledge that it may have been the path to success for SOME of the 0.1% who can work 18 hours a day nonstop for a decade with extreme natural ability and a fair amount of chance (confirmation bias aside) and not the end-all of being successful that everyone should strive for. Yes, there is certainly a correlation between working hard and being successful - regardless of your natural ability. Don't do it at the expense of living.
Take it to the extreme: what happens when EVERYONE works that hard? You're back at your normal level of relative productivity.