Last month, a 22-year-old entrepreneur named Emil Barr published a Wall Street Journal op-ed boasting a provocative title: “‘Work-Life Balance’ Will Keep You Mediocre.”
He opens with a spicy take:
“I’m 22 and I’ve built two companies that together are valued at more than $20 million…When people ask how I did it, the answer isn’t what they expect—or want—to hear. I eliminated work-life balance entirely and just worked. When you front-load success early, you buy the luxury of choice for the rest of your life.”
As Barr elaborates, when starting his first company, he slept only three and a half hours per night. “The physical and mental toll was brutal: I gained 80 pounds, lived on Red Bull and struggled with anxiety,” he writes. “But this level of intensity was the only way to build a multimillion-dollar company.”
He ends the piece with a wonderfully cringe-inducing flourish. “I plan to become a billionaire by age 30,” he writes. “Then I will have the time and resources to tackle problems close to my heart like climate change, species extinction and economic inequality.”
(Hold for applause.)
It’s easy to mock Barr’s twenty-something bravado, even if I do have to be careful not to be the pot calling the kettle black (ahem).
Yet, some of this knee-jerk mockery might stem from the uncomfortable realization that beneath this performative busyness, there may lie a kernel of truth. Are we forfeiting our opportunity to make a meaningful impact with our work if we prioritize balance too much? As NYU professor Suzy Welch noted, “I do give [Barr] points for saying something I only mutter to my M.B.A. students …You cannot well-being yourself to wealth.”
To help address these fears, let’s turn to the advice of another twenty-something: me. In an essay I published when I was all of 27—around the time I was finishing my doctoral dissertation at MIT—I wrote the following:
“I found writing my thesis to be similar to writing my books. It’s an exercise in grit: You have to apply hard focus, almost every day, over a long period of time.
To me, this is the definition of what I call hard work. The important point, however, is that the regular blocks of hard focus that comprise hard work do not have to be excessively long. That is, there’s nothing painful or unsustainable about hard work. With only a few exceptions, for example, I was easily able to maintain my fixed 9 to 5:30 schedule while writing my thesis.
By contrast, the work schedule [followed by many graduate students] meets the definition of what I call hard to do work. Working 14 hours a day, with no break, for months on end, is very hard to do! It exhausts you. It’s painful. It’s impossible to sustain.
I’m increasingly convinced that a lot of student stress is caused by a failure to recognize the difference between these two work types. Students feel that big projects should be hard, so hard to do habits seem a natural fit.
I am hoping that by explicitly describing the alternative of doing plain hard work, I can help convince you that the hard to do strategy is a terrible way to tackle large…challenges.”
I gave that article a simple, declarative title: Focus Hard. In Reasonable Bursts. One Day at a Time.
This strategy has continued to serve me well. I’m now 43 years old and, I suppose, still managing to avoid mediocrity—all while continuing to rarely work past 5:30 p.m. I’m not willing to sacrifice all the other things I care about in order to grind.
Barr is still young, and his body is resilient enough to get away with his hustle for a while longer. I hope, however, that those who found his message appealing might also hear mine. Deep results require disciplined, relentless action over a long period of time, and this is a very different commitment than the type of unfocused freneticism lionized by Barr. I work hard almost every day. But those days are rarely hard to get through. This distinction matters.
