Bill Gates on work-life balance

August 30, 2023

In his 20s, when he was building Microsoft, Bill didn’t believe in weekends or vacations. He even memorized his employees’ license plates to track their working hours.

As he puts it:

“You can over-worship and mythologize the idea of working extremely hard… and I don’t think most people would enjoy it—once I got into my 30s I could hardly even imagine how I had done that… But it is nice if during those first several years you have a team that has chosen to be pretty maniacal about the company. In terms of how far that goes, you need to have a mutual understanding so that one person isn’t expecting one thing and another person expecting another thing… But yes, I have a fairly hardcore view that there should be a very large sacrifice made during those early years.”

Elon Musk emphasizes this as well:

“If other people are putting in 40-hour work weeks, and you’re putting in 80 hour work weeks, you will achieve in 6 months what takes them a year to achieve, which will greatly improve your odds of success”

Why make such extreme sacrifices?

Well, as Paul Graham puts it in his essay How To Make Wealth:

“Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four.”

In the early years, you will have to make lots of sacrifices and shouldn’t really expect much work-life balance if you want your startup to be successful.

But you can view it as an opportunity to compress your whole working life into a few years.

And hopefully excitement about what you’re building and the extremely-talented team you’re building it with make those long hours way more fun and rewarding than a normal 9-to-5 job.