Do You Need to Put in 80-Hour Weeks to Be a Good Worker?

How much should you work?

During the course of an argument over H1-B visas on X, a debate opened up about working 80 hours per week. Most people seemed to think working that much was borderline crazy. Others thought it was practically a necessity for high achievers:

So, who’s right? How hard should you work? Are you lazy if you don’t want to work 80 hours per week? Are you nuts if you think people should?

Well, first of all, I can speak to all of this from experience because I was putting in 80-hour weeks at one point. I would work a full-time day job, eat dinner, work out (inconsistently), go work on building Right Wing News for 5-6 hours, sleep for a few hours (yes, I actually averaged 4-5 hours of sleep M-F for 2-3 years) and do it again. I also put in those same 5-6 hours on Right Wing News on the weekends. So yes, my life was pretty much eating, sleeping, doing my day job, and then grinding away on my side hustle until it became my full-time gig.

Even after I was no longer putting in that much time, I was so much of a workaholic that I worked 7 days per week and put in hours during my vacations. It was VERY HARD for me to allow myself to just regularly take a Saturday off and if it hadn’t been for Tim Ferriss’ “The 4-Hour Workweek” teaching me to build a business in a way that I didn’t need to be involved in every little thing, I don’t know where I’d be today.

The reason I say that is working like that delivers a lot of rewards but also has a lot of real-life consequences.

On the rewards side, getting after it like that allows you to outcompete other people. You’re immersed in what’s going on. You’re taking care of details other people don’t notice. That level of dedication pays dividends in experience, levels of success, knowledge, and money. That’s why you’ll see some extremely successful, driven people do it. Similarly, this is something you’ll see in the tech world. Talented people will sign on to the small, promising, new company and work themselves to death with the hopes of cashing out in their thirties with a huge pile of money.

Is that a reasonable thing to do for a lot of people?

I’d say, “Absolutely.” Do you want to start your own business? Then, you’re almost certainly going to work a lot harder to get it off the ground than you would for another person. You may have to do the work of 3 or 4 employees, PLUS all the things it takes to float the business. Similarly, if the opportunity is good enough to set yourself up financially for life, does it make sense to put in the time even if it consumes your life for a while? Yes, it does. If I could go back in time and just get a “normal” 40-hour-per-week job during that time, would I? Not a chance. I’m glad I went for it. It paid off big time.

However, I also mentioned that there are real-life consequences to doing that. That’s also true. As a starter, it’s not a healthy lifestyle. You don’t get enough sleep. It’s hard to find time to exercise enough. Most people doing it eat a lot of garbage because it’s fast, easy, and gives them a little pleasure in the midst of all that work-related stress. Oh, and even if you handle stress really well, it’s still stressful because human beings are not meant to only work. When you’re young and your body is incredibly resilient, you can take it. Unfortunately, as you get older, the lack of sleep, eating junk, not getting enough exercise, and non-stop stress physically wear you down. Your hormones start to drop off. Your body produces less dopamine. Suddenly, you find just can’t hack it anymore.

Mark Bell, who’s a champion powerlifter, has said that you’re going to recover from exercise one way or the other. Either you’re going to choose to do it, or if you try to push yourself non-stop, your body is going to break down and FORCE YOU to do it. For the vast majority of human beings, it works the same way with these crushing work schedules as you get older. Either you’re going to start subconsciously distracting yourself with bullsh*t for a big percentage of your week to make things easier, you’re going to get sick or you’re going to burn out completely. As someone who listens to a lot of longevity podcasts, I can tell you that hard-charging workaholics who develop heart problems or an immune disorder in their late thirties or early forties is a recurring theme that you hear again and again.

While I don’t know anyone that’s happened to personally, I have seen multiple people who seemed to never stop working just lose that drive as they get older. In a sense, that’s natural. If you’re working all the time, how do you have time for a spouse? For kids? To get in shape? To do all the things you want to do in life? The advantage of being “unbalanced” is you can often get ahead of everyone else in whatever you’re unbalanced at, but being unbalanced is also its own punishment. To get that advantage in one area of your life, you’re feeding everything else that’s important to you into a grinder. Your work gets the best of you and everything and everybody else gets what’s left over.

In other words, for most human beings, it’s an unsustainable, temporary trade-off – and a lot of human beings have no interest in it.

What if that’s you? Does that say something negative about you? No. Not at all.

Not everyone should or even can put in those kinds of hours. If you want a nice, balanced life, that’s great, too. Everybody doesn’t have to do the same thing, have the same goals, or go down the same path.

That said, if you do want to go down that work-heavy path for a while, is it worth it?

If you’re a woman, you may not like hearing this, but probably not. If you spend 10-20 years after college obsessively grinding, are you still going to be able to get married? Are you still going to be able to have a kid? A man can unreservedly say “yes,” but it becomes a very iffy proposition for a woman.

On the other hand, what about if you’re a man? Well, if you have a lot of ambition, a strong work ethic, and can mentally handle it, it’s an opportunity to get yourself ahead of the curve for the rest of your life. Getting a business running, making a ton of money in a high-dollar job, or even working multiple jobs simply to stack cash to invest will pay off over the long haul.

Over the last decade, adjusted for inflation, the stock market has given a 9.5% return. Let’s say you just worked a second job for a decade and earned 100k, which is extremely doable over that time period, even if you’re not working 80 hours per week. In 25 years, that would turn into almost a million dollars:

At the end of the day, it’s good to have a job that pays your bills and helps provide meaning to your life. You don’t have to work 80 hours per week or put work at the center of your life to do that, but if you want to go in that direction? It can absolutely be worth it. So, if it’s something you really want to do, there’s nothing wrong with going for it.

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