All of the pep talk type Youtube channels that OP mentions (Gary Vee, Mark Cuban etc), they push (IMO) a wrong idea of startups : they all say you should work 16 hours a day, bare minimum sleep, hustle and grind (god, those words make me cringe). That advice completely ignores health and general well being, which is essential if you're in it for the long haul.
Anyway, this list seems interesting. Thanks OP for compiling this.
I don't think that's true. Gary Vee has said things like that in the past but more recently said he devotes weekends to family, sleeps more, and vacations more[0]. Tim Ferris literally got famous from a book titled "The 4 Hour Work-week". Mark Cuban is frankly on a different level (the 3 comma club really is different IMO).
Hustle and grind are traits not mutually exclusive from being healthy.
I'll go so far as to posit that most highly successful entrepreneurs (I'm talking big, high-growth companies here) end up sacrificing at least one of the following: sleep, free time, relationships, starting a family, or general health.
The real question is–between the success and the sacrifice–which one causes the other?
Everything I've seen from GaryVee recently has been along the lines of "you're not doing enough work."
More specifically he says you're probably not working enough if you're running some sort of personal narrative that you're all that business-wise or ever going to be a multi-millionaire/whatever.
He frequently says that sort of life is not for everyone and people who are happy doing a dayjob and devoting their time to personal pursuits should be envied. But if you want to be chasing the beasts of big money and big business and be all about being the big-I-am, you better be working long and hard.
I don't know where I read it, but I like the idea of life stages. When you're in your 20's, hustle and grind and work a lot. You will never have as few obligations and as much energy as you do when you're young.
Take advantage of youth.
But if you're a 40-something with 3 kids and spend 16 hours a day grinding and working, and no time spending time with your family ... don't. Slow down.
A lot of GaryVee's advice is aimed at people who have few responsibilities and obligations in life and spend 5 hours every day watching TV or playing video games and complain that success doesn't come. Yeah, obviously it doesn't. Work harder.
If you're already working harder, you're not GaryVee's audience. How do you even have time to watch his stuff? ;)
Having consumed a decent amount of his content, there's a bit of context to this - if you're complaining about not being successful as an entrepreneur, you're not doing enough work. He has said before that if you want to work 9-5 and find good work-life balance, then that's great and you should do that and that there's nothing wrong with it.
I honestly don't believe that he took less than a weekend off during his entire twenties. The way that statement comes across to me is hyperbole used to drive home the main point of "stop complaining and trying to look successful, and start working".
At ~12:50 he also says "it's okay to enjoy a little bit now too" and that the advice he'd give to himself at 25 is "go have fun". He tends to provide more realistic advice than a lot of other people who produce this type of content, at least from what I've seen.
Thanks so much for this video. Not a millennial, but I got a lot out of it. Especially this part where he checks the Millennial caller with something that I too am guilty of from time to time.
> So you are playing a fake narrative instead of putting in the actual work that's needed to actually pull it off.
It's only human to believe that things can only be achieved with sacrifice and that great things require great sacrifice. It was this mentality that led our ancestors to sacrifice animals and even human beings at ancient altars. |
But rationally we can see that sacrifice is not always needs and that a good idea and good implementation and a vision for improving the world in some way can go much further than sacrifice and sacrifice alone without good ideas and good implementation will amount to nothing.
I'm not saying that maybe some extra work and sacrifice won't be needed but sacrifice shouldn't be thought of as an a-priori essential or even necessary element to success.
The line you're quoting "I desire mercy not sacrifice" does not mean what you think it means.
Sacrifice in that context is essentially apologizing for sinning. Not giving something up so that you gain something else. Unless you count giving up sin to gain something...
It's not a good thing.
The sister verse to that is "To obey is better than sacrifice".
To your point, sacrificing self-indulgence is really sacrificing addiction. Rather do something productive and worthwhile. And that may be quality time with your family or helping a non-profit etc.
The verse was used twice, once in Hosea 6 and the other in Matthew 9.
Hosea 6 clearly refers to burnt sacrificial offerings like killing animals. consider the full context:
"I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice,
the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings."
Matthew 9:13 just quotes the verse in Hosea and talks more about loving others and being merciful to those who are sinning:
“It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
Apologizing for sinning (ie. repentence) remains an essential part of Christian doctrine and the bible
I didn't assume Christianity or Judaism on your part. Though, it's less likely for a Jew to mistake sacrifice (for atonement) to forgoing things to be able to do other things.
But "sacrificing things" to work harder is still not the context of either.
I don't really understand the reason for your reply.
It's not about short-term masochism, it's about focus.
The human brain is non-scalable neural network.It only has so much bandwidth. The things that create/capture enough value to make big money are almost always non-trivial/hard. Market forces are the reason for that. There is a lot of competition by smart, driven people for the relatively scarce economically viable applications of technology within current market conditions.
And resources will be scarce, help will be scarce, an unending line of people will either want what you have secured or want to destory you via regulation or lawsuits.
Your employees will definitely not care as much as you do, and can get disgruntled and cause bad trouble. It's really best to move through the business world thinking everyone is out to get you. Only the liability paranoid survive.
So for those reasons and more, if you focus on more than health + your business, you are likely to get eaten by someone else who isn't spreading his or her focus as much.
> It's really best to move through the business world thinking everyone is out to get you
i agree, but a more useful way of thinking is that everyone is looking out for themselves, and can be expected to act exactly in that manner. you getting got is usually a side effect of someone else getting theirs through unethical means.
Having consumed a lot of GV's content, I disagree with your comment. Whilst I do not agree with working unhealthy hours and working on minimum sleep, GV doesn't explicitly advise people to do that. He preaches that if you're unhappy doing what you're currently doing, you have to work hard to change that, rather than sitting on "ideas" and never doing anything about them and living with "what if".
Gary himself may work long hours on minimum sleep but he has always said he is wired differently to many people and that sort of lifestyle isn't sustainable for most.
However, I do agree that the list is interesting, there's some good content I haven't come across before which is always nice to find; thanks OP!
Firstly, I think it's easy to confuse the two narratives of not doing enough work and working too much.
From most of the GaryVee content I watched recently the general feeling I took away is that many people are looking for the "quick fix" when really they just need to put in the hours. Not necessarily unhealthy hours, but hard hours never the less. And that they just need to do, and not think or plan in many cases. Try this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRj144Gd7EA
Secondly, personally I found it really enlightening watching Casey Neistat's youtube VLOGs to see when he was very intentionally carving out time for family, and other things like running. You would see him intentionally rush home so that he could spend an hour with his baby daughter before she went to sleep - even if he had to go back out to work afterwards.
Of course, that's easier than it might be for some when you can ride a skateboard home from work in 10 minutes and a similar time to where his Wife works (he would carve out date time etc as well in the middle of the day). Never the less I thought it was good to see the very intentional time carving, especially from someone clearly so busy and juggling a lot of priorities (starting a company, a daily vlog, a new baby/family and a personal life).
Despite all of that, it certainly was having impact on his life but it seemed clear to me the impact would have been much worse for some people not taking that very intentional and active effort to carve out time for these things.
I haven't watched that much Gary Vee but from what I've seen he is at times informative & entertaining but mostly cringe worthy. He is a little too high on his own supply for me.
the hustle stuff normally makes me cringe, but once I heard Gary V's logic it made more sense. Basically he says that he can't go and tell people to get more talent, so in his mind the only way to get better results is to work more. Whether working more will actually help is debatable.
Anyway, this list seems interesting. Thanks OP for compiling this.