Discounting Reality

The world has started to sound like a stopwatch.

Everywhere I look, the same idea takes hold — that we can do more, faster, and reach success in ever-shorter spans of time. Speed has become a virtue. Being “hardcore” a badge of honour. Working ourselves to the bone, a form of proof. Podcasts at 2x speed. Powder stirred in water as food, because it’s faster.

I am definitely in this bubble. And if you’re reading this, it’s likely you’re in that bubble with me.

We treat everything like a race, as if victory on quantifiable measures such as follower counts, valuations, or market capitalisation were all that mattered, and at their altar, everything else is sacrificed.

I want to challenge this notion, not to deny that hard work, sense of urgency, and rigour are key ingredients, but to suggest that they aren’t the whole story.

Focus

My biggest learning has been that moving faster demands ever more focus than just working harder.

Most people who are grinding away are doing so because they can’t focus. When we can’t decide what really matters, we try to do everything. Then, to hide the lack of focus, we work harder and longer, mistaking exhaustion for progress — creating a comforting illusion that we’re closer than we would have been without the long nights.

The impatience trap. Everything takes longer than planned (Given you don’t change scope), and impatience tempts us to change direction — especially when we see others sprinting in a marathon. To make matters worse, some people create only the appearance of effort, which makes us question our own pace. Combined with the seductive pull of “trying something new” over slogging through the current plan, this is almost impossible to resist.

The first mile is generally fun, the last one is brutal.

99% of all strategy changes — in companies and in life — happen without any new data to justify them. They’re born of impatience, not insight. Strategy A should only be abandoned after it is tried out, or when new data increases its odds of failure.

The ability to define a narrow focus and hold it is incredibly hard. You can be sure it will be challenged every single day.

Waste

Most people’s days are an accumulation of small losses of focus. The average person checks Slack or email every six minutes on average. Our brains end up juggling an ever-growing list of to-dos and half-finished thoughts. The result: exhaustion, distraction, shallower thoughts, slower progress, more bugs, and longer time spent on smaller tasks.

Waste isn’t just about time lost — it’s about energy fragmented.

This context switching is exhausting. It leads us to chase relief in random web surfing or endless scrolling during work hours, mistaking escape for rest. Email scrolling is a form of doomscrolling.

I sometimes find myself scrolling the ‘Random’ channel in Slack, which in hindsight feels like a replacement for Instagram.

While the 10x engineer, PM, or designer is probably technically better, they are also, at their core, better at keeping wasteful distractions at bay. This ability magnifies their skill edge.

Then there’s the lack of courage to make decisions, which is essentially a leadership failure. It manifests as more meetings, more “data” gathering (data can tell any story you want), and endless cycles of analysis all in preparation to defuse blame if something fails. So much time is lost to meetings that exist purely to dilute accountability.

And finally there are leaders who haven't learned how to coach a team. Coaching takes slightly longer in the short term, so instead, they try to fix problems themselves, every time. Steve Jobs called this out as one of the greatest lessons he learned in his career.

When focus and courage align, something beautiful happens: a short to-do list frees cognitive resources → which allows more progress → which deepens focus → which enables solving harder problems → which gets stuff done faster → which creates more time and energy → which feeds back into better work.

The more I’ve practiced this, the more I’ve become a firm believer that most of us can do everything required of us in 40 hours a week, give or take. And this is coming from someone who has done 80-hour weeks since their internship.

Cal Newport’s A World Without Email beautifully explores this idea. One example that I thought was worth sharing, is that of Extreme Programming, a philosophy born in one corner of the Valley that showed how working with greater focus, not harder, could yield “outsized” results and get stuff done faster. They tried the creative rule that all production code was pair-programmed and the teams are small and in-person. The result: they worked on the problem together in person, instead of on Slack. Because they were on the same machine and couldn’t progress unless they were both working on it, neither spent time replying to random messages or scrolling the web. It cut the waste to basically zero. They enforced a 40 hour work week rule, and say those 40-hour teams outperformed 80-hour teams.

I’ve tried putting this focus and waste cutting philosophy into practice over the past few weeks, and it’s torturously hard. It feels like day one at the gym, every day, every neuron screaming in protest.

When we work 80 hours a week, we inherently become less effective. Work expands to fill the time. There is far more waste than if we had simply worked 40 focused hours.

Once we begin to focus and eliminate waste, another truth becomes clear: hard work is not the same as hard things.

Hard Things, Not Hard Work

If you spend enough time on tech Twitter, you’ll eventually see this line: “Think how you can achieve your 10-year plan in 6 months.”

At first glance, it sounds like a call to push harder. But sit with it for a moment, and you’ll realise it’s about creativity — about having the courage to take moonshot bets, to be okay with failing at a grander scale, not just grinding longer nights.

Creativity and courage come from stepping outside the comfort zone — doing hard things, not merely working hard. Egos bloated with past success must be set aside. Risks that make you look foolish must be taken. Anyone can pedal faster; that doesn’t particularly require intelligence. Maybe steroids.

From afar, it often looks like most smart people and organisations become less creative once they find success. Like lab animals, they discover the lever that releases the food pellet and spend the rest of their time hammering it, harder and faster, chasing the same dopamine hit. Maybe that’s not a flaw but an evolutionary feature, one that allows room for new entrants to disrupt complacent incumbents via creativity.

The Cost of the Race

But there’s a cost to thinking everything is a race, all the time. We’re trapped in a global prisoner’s dilemma.

We’ve whipped up entire generations into a frenzy. From listening to podcasts at 2x speed to consuming our meals via powdered mixtures stirred into water to “save time.” We begin to believe that shortcuts aren’t just possible, but necessary.

Sure, luck (shortcuts) happens. Maybe you bought the right lottery ticket or invested early in Nvidia because you liked gaming PCs. But shortcuts cannot be a strategy. Optimising for them is a recipe for long-term disappointment at a civilisation scale. A whole swath of society will feel inadequate, let down, and convinced the system is rigged, and that belief has dangerous consequences.

The other cost is mangled souls. Without time to take a walk, to watch the sunset, to sit around the dinner table and talk to loved ones about something other than work, we lose the space where dreams form. Dreams that fulfil us and inspire us.

We can’t create a better future if we never stop to imagine one. Pause and think: when you’re 60, what stories will you tell your grandkids? I can assure you that the story about hitting the stretch KPI goal of Q3 2025 will make them put on their VR headsets and stop listening.

This, I think, is why so many products today feel bland. They’re chasing optimisations and growth hacks, making us spend more time exercising our thumbs and sucking up our time on things, that, frankly do not matter. They lack the imagination that only a wandering mind can produce.

I’m a hopeless optimist, or as my friends say, naïve. But I do believe that hard work and putting in the hours can build a better world. But I also believe we can reach that utopia without waging war on the soul.

The ER and the Lie

I wrote this seven days after spending almost eight hours across two days in the ER. The first day, I went because of a back injury. I sat in a chair for hours, tears running down my face from pain, still messaging on Slack.

I went home, and found myself lightheaded from exhaustion and drugs, lost my balance, slipped, and hit my head hard enough to end up in the ER again. I was still wearing the hospital tag from the previous day. I ended up in front of the same triage nurse. Looks were exchanged.

And the crazy part? While this was my first trip to the ER, it wasn’t the first time I’d worked through an injury or during a holiday.

I love what I do. I really do. And I’m lucky: I don’t work to increase shareholder value, but to create things that make this world a genuinely better place. (Though if you looked at Reddit, you might think we’re lazy and don’t know what we’re doing. But I digress.)

The truth is: the “work harder, grind, grind, grind” story is only half true at best.

Can you name one world-changing thing built in a few months? Progress takes time. The first vaccine, smallpox, took 160 years to create.

Reality is distorted because we only hear about things when they “suddenly” explode. The years, sometimes decades, of effort, of pain, of sacrifices, or taking time to get it right are invisible, creating the illusion of shortcuts.

OpenAI is a 10-year-old company. Nvidia is 32 years old. Yet more and more people want tomorrow yesterday, and think it’s possible.

You can want tomorrow yesterday. The problem is, you’ll miss out on today. And today is the only thing that’s real. This made me reframe what leadership means — beyond just endurance.

The Leadership Challenge

What I’ve learned, painfully I might add, is that I’m just as susceptible as anyone to this speed-frenzy trap. Once you taste success a few times, or even just stand close to it, you start pedalling faster. Forgetting that the terrain, the people, the society, even you, have changed since the last time. It’s the first instinct: work harder. And recently it has been glorified.

Achieving the 10-year plan in six months isn’t about hours — it’s about humility. It’s about setting aside the ego that makes you think you already know how to succeed at the next stage. It’s about finding creative solutions, being willing to fail and accept failure on an ever larger scale, teaching rather than doing everything yourself, and giving yourself and your team the time to dream.

That’s the real challenge of leadership.

I loved a scene from Space Force that captures the one facet of this beautifully. General Naird, played by Steve Carell, is questioned in Congress about why Space Force spent $10,000 on an orange. The cost, of course, came from sending things to orbit. His reply (paraphrased):

“These women and men spend months away from their families, trapped in a tin can, drinking their own filtered urine, to push civilisation forward. A fresh orange is a reminder of what all their sacrifice is for.”

Leaders need to look beyond the carrot and the whip to make people work harder.

Without giving the team the time and space to enjoy the fruits of their labor, how can we expect people to bring their creative selves, their full passion to work?

A sense of urgency, hard work, and rigour are vital, but they must be balanced by focus, creativity, reflection, and courage. And above all, by the acceptance that things take time. If we want them faster, it’s not just about doing more. Otherwise, reality takes over, and we burn out. Not the kind that gets you a doctor’s note and some happy drugs, but the kind that subdues the spirit.

So Yes to Work-Life Balance?

You might have noticed that I did not mention work-life balance even once. That’s deliberate. I still believe that making a dent in the world demands hard work. Real progress requires patience, persistence, and sacrifice. It asks you to care deeply enough about something that you’re willing to give up comfort for it.

Add to that, happiness — true happiness, not dopamine hits — lives on the other side of hard work. Even biology agrees. The reward that comes after struggle lasts longer and runs deeper than the quick spike of instant gratification.

But it’s easy to mistake hard work for simply more work. The belief that moving from 40 hours to 80 hours a week doubles your impact has become gospel in some circles. In reality, it often does the opposite. Work expands to fill the hours we give it, and the quality of thought — the real driver of progress — begins to decay.

Maybe balance isn’t about working less. Maybe it’s about protecting the parts of yourself that make the work worth doing. Focus, curiosity, creativity, courage — those are fragile things. They need time and space to breathe.

I believe technology will continue to pave the way to a world with less suffering, and more abundance, as it has done throughout human history. For all the problems that we have in the world today, we are overall better off. The pursuit of grand goals, and the sacrifices they require, are justifiable if they truly make life better for those who come after us.

But given we can’t actually have tomorrow yesterday, and with ever fewer hours to imagine a better future, we might not get there at all. The challenge now is how to keep making progress without littering the path with lives spent under fluorescent lights instead of watching the sun turn orange before it slips beyond the horizon.

Pause. Breathe.

Let me leave you with a question:

When was the last time you paused long enough to find a more creative way to do something — instead of just pushing harder? And if it’s been a while, when will you make the time?