TL;DR: I feel very insecure whenever I hear about founders who work extremely hard, because I simply can't do the same<p>As a solo founder, I really want to succeed, yet everytime I work too hard, I burn out. To combat that, I rented an office, do a baseline 9-5 pm unless for important situations, no phones after work, save Saturday for a faraway trip + laundry/video games, play team sport on Sunday + tidy/video games.<p>Then I'd listen to a podcast about how the founding Facebook engineer works 70 hours, and wakes up at 4 am to check if hackers hacked into the system. Or Bill Gates / Elon Musk sleeping in office etc. Or most harrowingly, YC's constant emphasis about working in the same apartment, in-person, and constantly working, never taking a holiday (YC's emphasis makes me the most fearful, because I listen to them on everything). And part of me thinks - oh it must be myth, because from my personal experience, whenever I overwork, I made critical errors of pushing bugs into deployment from impatience, bad quality thinking etc. way worse if I had done nothing.<p>Yet a constant part of me is thinking - what if I'm wrong - what if some people can work that hard, and there's something I'm missing and it's dramatically decreasing my chance of ever achieving greatness?<p>Can someone please give as much detail into hard workingness? With concrete details of every day? How do you have fun? What's the theory of optimal productivity, beyond todo lists and Notion systems? How about sleep, insomnia? How about diet, how about mental health? etc. etc.