A few thoughts to add to the discussion, loosely related:
1) If I know exactly where to spend my time for the best rate of return, its likely that I'll have to spend relatively few hours achieving success.
2) For most people, the success they can achieve through just having a plain old job can be had for a mere 40 hours. Anything they want above what 40 hours can grant them should probably be done elsewhere (second job, side-hustle, etc) since the ROI will be very low for spending those additional hours at work.
3) The 80 hour week lifestyle is probably necessary for people who are still frantically doing what Felix Dennis calls "The Search", trying to build a company without the foggiest notion what people want.
"For creative work, you can't cheat. My believe is that there are 5 creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company."
5 creative hours in a day absolutely matches my experience based on my own career. I can get a HUGE amount done in those 5 hours if I apply them sensibly.
Work isn't always creative though is it? It's often more menial: meetings, learning new APIs, stepping through existing code, trial and error, mentoring, etc.
For these your ROI per hour goes down, but your total ROI still goes up even after 5 or even 8 hours. Maybe not for everyone everyday, but for some people some days for sure.
My experience/conclusions are similar to the comment above.
I feel like the hardest skill in jobs like programming, design (or any creative jobs, to be fair) is managing your cognitive resources, understanding when to approach problems requiring particular modes of thinking and when to stop, work on something else, or learn to do nothing.
In my mid 20s I did my share of reckless 80-100h weeks—ending up with depression and health issues that took years to recover. Some days are still challenging. And, I’m just 31.
No. He is not asking for 4 hours of work.
He is asking for laser-focused, 100% productive 4 hours work.
You can do additional work in the rest of the hours left that not necessarily is going to require that level of focus.
> My believe is that there are 5 creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company.
> Now true - some people, myself included, need a few hours to wind up and wind down for those to occur. Right now I'm procrastinating on twitter instead of writing my summit talk for instance. Reddit and HN are my siren calls.
> That's fine. We are not moist robots. We are people and people are awesome. What's even better than people are teams. Friends, that go on journeys doing difficult things.
While I'm sure they want people to do some non-creactive work - it sounds like in principle they'd be fine with 20 hours of focused creative work. Maybe a 6 hour day, to put in 4 hours of work?
I think some of it has to be taken as more of an adage than pragmatically. Firsly, the four hours may not be continuous so having random hours doesn't really work. Additionally, it's caveated with creative work, regardless of job title, a lot of work would involve non-creative aspects which need to be done.
Because there's meetings, email, IMs, documentation, waiting, etc. The rough breakdown is 20 hours of focused creative work and 20 hours of everything else per week.
I think he's assuming that people are going to spend some fraction of their time at work advancing their careers and maintaining their relationships with coworkers (and that he does not include that time as "creative work").
I agree and regarding 3) would you put most startup founders into this bucket? In reading Peter Thiel Zero to One I was struck by his point that real power law focus in a startup means you're doing something new, thus "The Search" is a required first step even if it's not your first rodeo.
I would suspect its true that most successful startup founders fall into the 80+ hour bucket, but I only have a handful of personal anecdata to support this (and for technical founders in the early days probably only 1/4 of that would be considered work, the rest being just an intense form of play!).
Re: Thiel, wasn't the point of that power law section meant to say that each founder should focus on what gives them leverage? I don't recall correctly.
"The Search" is the discovery of those things outside of your normal circles of concern, which makes it doubly-difficult to find _on purpose_. Felix Dennis describes the process more akin to an aware predator waiting for something to enter its kill-zone.
1) If I know exactly where to spend my time for the best rate of return, its likely that I'll have to spend relatively few hours achieving success.
2) For most people, the success they can achieve through just having a plain old job can be had for a mere 40 hours. Anything they want above what 40 hours can grant them should probably be done elsewhere (second job, side-hustle, etc) since the ROI will be very low for spending those additional hours at work.
3) The 80 hour week lifestyle is probably necessary for people who are still frantically doing what Felix Dennis calls "The Search", trying to build a company without the foggiest notion what people want.