The Truth About Balance, Hard-Work, and Mediocrity

Our discourse on performance, productivity, and success misses the boat entirely.

In a recent essay for the Wall Street Journal titled “Work-Life Balance Will Keep You Mediocre,” 22-year-old entrepreneur Emil Barr argues that his success—two companies he claims are valued at more than $20 million—comes from completely disregarding well-being and working all the time. He was “living on Red Bull, sleeping 3.5 hours per night, gaining 80 pounds, and struggling with anxiety.”

This, Barr says, is simply the cost of success, the cost of giving something your all.

At the same time, there is an entire industry of authors and influencers telling you to prioritize happiness, attain balance, and let enough be enough.

It can leave you wondering, which one is it?

The answer is neither. Both are selling fictions.

The Myth of Balance and Happiness

So much of the self-help industrial complex is built on a facade: people telling you to be content and to prioritize perfect balance, and yet those very same people work all the time, are not content, and strive relentlessly to get book sales, speaking engagements, and income. They are selling you one thing but doing the other. It’s like the Yoga teacher who espouses peace, love, discipline, and harmony, and who is simultaneously sleeping with all the students. Something about it just doesn’t sit right.

It's impossible to be the perfect friend, athlete, parent, partner, employee, read 50 books every year, stay up to date on the TV shows everyone is talking about, do all the "self-care" things, and on and on and on. This sort of balance is an illusion.

For many people, especially if your temperamentally inclined toward striving and growth, it is better to do a few things well, with full intention and care, than it is to do a bunch of things just sort of average. Part of being a mature adult is realizing that tradeoffs exist. Nobody can do it all. Nobody can be great at everything.

So many of the people we admire most—great artists, athletes, doctors, scientists, authors, and entrepreneurs—are not living “balanced” lives, at least not in the ways that we commonly think about the term.

Once you shed the illusion of balance you can begin to prioritize. You can make tradeoffs. You can give yourself permission to go all in on what matters to you most, while leaving other things behind. This is no small feat. It’s key to living a good and meaningful life.

What matters most to you will probably change over time. Your job is to evaluate these shifting priorities and adjust as necessary. It’s okay to have different seasons of life for different pursuits.

For many of the most interesting and fulfilled people, when you zoom in on any single period of their lives they don’t look very balanced. But when you zoom out and look across the entirety of their lives, they appear quite balanced. They have different seasons for emphasizing different pursuits.

Instead of striving for balance and telling yourself that attaining it will lead to some sort of enduring happiness, make it your aim to spend your time and energy on what you value and what matters to you most. Excellence, greatness, satisfaction, lasting contribution—all the qualities we yearn for—require aligning your time and energy with your priorities, and being okay with letting other stuff go.

The Myth of Hustle-Culture Greatness

At the same time, the “you need to work with non-stop intensity and disregard everything else” narrative is repeatedly proven wrong.

The research is clear: this type of total obsession is associated with burnout, fraud, cheating, depression, anxiety, and declining performance.

It’s true that you can work with extreme intensity for short periods of time, but it’s wholly unsustainable, especially if you sacrifice sleep. Your entire output becomes one big bubble waiting to burst—and it always does. (Not too dissimilar from the companies that many proponents of hustle culture build.)

In his essay, Barr gives the example of Kobe Bryant waking up at 4 AM to justify his own hustle. What he didn’t mention is that Bryant also took multiple naps per day.

Different people have different capacities for work, and you can build that capacity over time. But even in a world where all you care about is your work—which for most people, is not such a great life—everyone has limits.

Once you start shortchanging sleep, stop exercising, and cut out social time, bad things happen. You need these three habits not just for health and durability but also for cognitive and emotional performance. Otherwise, you burn yourself out or end up in a terrible place because your craft is literally all that you have, which makes you fragile to failure and taking risks.

The other example Barr gives in his essay is Elon Musk, someone who clearly has a high capacity for work. But even then, around the time of the COVID-19 pandemic reports are that Musk stopped sleeping, made little-to-no time for exercise, and largely isolated himself. Since then, he’s struggled with substance abuse, conspiracy theories, and his companies have underperformed. Musk has accomplished more than most in a work context; perhaps he’s even changed the world (see Tesla and SpaceX). But even Musk has limits—and once he exceeded them, things got ugly.

Serious, Hard, Disciplined Work

While there is an abundance of writing and information on balance and hustle-culture greatness, there is a large dearth when it comes to doing serious, hard, and disciplined work. A few guiding principles go a long way to keep you on track:

First, you need to establish minimum effective doses for sleep, exercise, and social connection. These are boundaries that you rarely, if ever, go below. For instance, you don’t sleep less than 7 hours per night, you exercise for at least 30 minutes five days per week, and you gather with friends at least weekly. Even when things are full-tilt at work, even when you are going “all in,” you need to keep these in check—lest your entire operating system goes out of whack, and fast.

Second, you need to make a distinction between working toward creating value and working toward creating fatigue. Anyone can grind, make themselves tired, and then trick themselves into thinking they did something productive simply because they are so tired. But this has little to no purpose, and ends up setting you back in the long-run. The writer and computer scientist Cal Newport calls it the difference between “hard work” and “hard to do work”:

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 who pride themselves on the grind] 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 stress is caused by a failure to recognize the difference between these two work types.

Once you’ve completed hard work, there is a temptation to dive into hard to do work. This a particularly common trap with hustle culture. You need to prove—perhaps to others around you; to yourself; or to a puritan God presiding over heaven—that you’ve got what it takes, that you can grind. But grinding for the sake of grinding makes no sense. It is counterproductive to actual performance.

Third, you need to be okay with going “all in,” but you can’t be all in, all the time. This requires the self-awareness to honestly evaluate and re-evaluate the trade-offs inherent to living an unbalanced, flow-filled life. It ensures that you communicating with loved ones and making conscious decisions about how you spend your time and energy, and thus decreases the chances that you’ll have regrets about what you did, and didn’t, do. It helps you realize when your identity may be getting too interwoven with a specific activity and that in some instances—writing a book, the first few months with a newborn baby, or trying to make an Olympic team, for example—your lack of balance may be excessive, but it can be O.K. because it’s temporary.

Ignore the grift of people telling you not to work hard, all the while they themselves are grinding away for their own success. Also ignore the grift of hustle culture and nonstop work, which is a surefire path to burnout and misery.

If you are wired to push hard and strive, that’s great. Embrace it. But it’s equally important to put some constraints around your drive, lest it consumes you and leads to deteriorating health and performance.

Remember: the goal isn’t to have an extraordinary day, month, or even year.

The goal is to create an extraordinary body of work.