There are many industries in which people work hard to win. The startup world is for sure one of them. From the daily "grindset" post by founders on LinkedIn or Twitter, to the comments by VCs that the ones that work the hardest will win, it seems that the only way to suceed is to never sleep or spend a minute not on work.
As a young founder, I have been constantly comparing myself to these ideals, feeling uneasy about any time I took off or the days where I didn't wake up at 4am to "work while the competition sleeps". Am I spoiling my own success? Am I too "weak" for making it in the startup world?
Don't get me wrong, I have still worked my ass off in the past years that I have been a founder. But often I also remembered quotes like "building a startup is a marathon, not a sprint" or the advice from friends and family to get the necessary rest.
In the recent months, I realized a simple truth that helped me adopt a much less bipolar perspective: What if your productivity is much more the result of your reserves than how much you push? Maybe the decision between performing at or below par is not made in the moment of action? Maybe you shouldn't beat yourself up for not pushing hard enough when you were actually just squeezing out last drops from the tube?
Your energy reservoir
Take the example of a water reservoir that a city uses for generating electricity. The total amount of energy it can exert is not given by how much it pushes its gates open and drives the generators harder. It's only dependent on the amount of water it holds. The harder it drives its generators, the faster the reservoir depletes until it loses its ability to even keep the generators running at all.
Sure, opening the gates wider matters - when you need a surge of power for peak demand, that capacity is real and valuable. But it's a question of flow rate, not total capacity. You can push the last few percentage points by maxing out the generators, but if your reservoir is at 20%, you're not powering the city for long no matter how wide you open those gates.
The reservoir fills slowly and steadily - through rainfall, through rivers feeding into it, through the natural accumulation that happens when you're not drawing from it. Good sleep is the steady rain that refills the reservoir every night. Time with people you care about, walks without your phone, evenings where you actually stop working - these are what raise the water level.
So, the next time you may be unhappy about your own productivity, ask yourself the question whether you have been recharging enough. More often than not, it may have been that you've been withdrawing much more than you have been replenishing.