can founders have a work/life balance? no.
“The important thing is this: to be able, at any moment, to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.”
Earlier this week I received an email from an aspiring entrepreneur asking about work/life balance for entrepreneurs. By suggestion of this individual, it seemed appropriate to turn it into a blog post.
The question:
“Dear Gabe,
I found your article about the number of hours an entrepreneur should work particularly about finding your own work rhythm very insightful.
My present difficulty is that I enjoy too many things outside work. I love philosophy, martial arts, taking walks around town. I feel these things bring joy and meaning into my life and yet at the same time are obstacles to my every achieving anything as they take a lot of my energy and focus.
I am sure that I cannot be the only person who has had such concerns and I would be very interested to hear your view.”
Every aspiring entrepreneur reaches a point where they must decide what their priorities are and the sacrifices they are and are not willing to make. One of the biggest sacrifices is the hours – specifically, the things outside of work that you end up missing out on. There is no right or wrong answer, but the decision is what separates the guys that get it done from the posers. For every real entrepreneur, I meet at least 100 posers.
I always tell people that I’ve never met a guy that doesn’t have a business plan. Anyone can come up with an idea and everyone loves the ‘what if’, but only a small percentage of people can truly stomach the reality of being an entrepreneur. Being an entrepreneur isn’t glamorous, it requires seemingly unreasonable sacrifices, and is one of the most stressful career paths anyone could ever choose. And while I wouldn’t wish heading up a startup on my worst enemy, I also wouldn’t choose to do anything else. I love it.
Marc Andreessen has a great take on this subject in his post entitled, “Why not to do a startup…” Andreessen says, “Just because you want people to have work/life balance, it’s not so easy when you’re close to running out of cash, your product hasn’t shipped yet, your VC is mad at you, and your Kleiner Perkins-backed competitor in Menlo Park — you know, the one whose employees’ average age seems to be about 19 — is kicking your butt. Which is what it’s going to be like most of the time. And even if you can help your employees have proper work/life balance, as a founder you certainly won’t.”
Sure, there are always examples of guys that did little work and reaped insane rewards (plentyoffish.com comes to mind), but those are anomalies – not even close to what one should expect. If you achieve tremendous success with a wonderful work/life balance, awesome, but the chances are not great.
I’d say to find one or two things that you really love to do, carve out a small amount of time each week to pursue them, and use the rest of your time to build a company. These activities can serve as a way to de-stress, but not take away from your primary goal, which is to build something of value.
These thoughts are really only meant to apply to when you’re heads down with a deal. Plenty of entrepreneurs take time off when/if they have the good fortune of some financially meaningful success.
Bottom line, it just depends on what you value the most. I’m under no delusion that being an entrepreneur is superior to other career paths and that everyone should do it. There’s an enormous amount of value in having a great work/life balance – I guess it’s just not for me.
