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Work and success

David Heinemeier Hansson, on Twitter:

Oh for fucks sake 🙄. Don’t sacrifice your 20s – or any other decade of life! – on the erroneous belief that unless you work round the clock, you’re not going to be “successful”. The world is full of people who were all work and now are all regret.

@dhh

“Most businesses fail, most people don’t become fabulously wealthy. Design your approach to life accordingly. Regret will haunt”

@dhh

and

When you reduce life to a rat race, all you see are rats. There’s a beautiful, cooperative, collaborative world outside of the rat’s maze. One filled with highly competent, fulfilled, and impactful people who couldn’t give two shits about your mental box. Y’all invited!

@dhh

This hustle-all-the-time culture is not only an path to burnout but also to defining yourself by your work, your title, your corporation. DHH makes the case that only a tiny percentage of people experience the sort of blowout success that makes up startup lore, and that most people who buy into the maxim that success is directly correlated to the hours of hard work you put in don’t design and live their life with this realisation.

This reply on the thread also deserves a mention:

It’s also a matter of focus. If you focus 8h a day on anything for a period of several years, you’ll be great at it. Most people can’t focus. They’re constantly distracted, thinking about the past or the future, but are not in the present. You don’t need to work 60h – be focused!

@sohrab21

The current startup culture is one of extremes of quantity (hours put in, headcounts, DAU/MAU numbers, GMV, followers); quality gets short shrift.