Your “Hustle” Is Not Enough

In industries filled with highly determined individuals, especially among entrepreneurs and high-level executives, it is easy to view exhaustion and sleep deprivation as a badge of honor for hard work. This mentality is so pervasive that I often hear people brag about sacrificing their well-being in the pursuit of success.
While I think it is important to stay motivated and work hard to achieve your goals, I believe it is equally important not to underestimate the value of rest. Think of resting like tuning an instrument; the process itself does not produce any music, but without setting aside the time for it, the music that the instrument eventually makes will not be enjoyable. For the longest time, I was under the impression that if I simply worked extremely hard towards my goals, that I would undoubtedly perform better than the people around me. However, after a couple of months of attempting to run on a measly six hours of sleep every night while also studying productive habits, I learned that taking breaks from working (including time to sleep) is also incredibly productive.
When taking time to rest, you have can discover your personal strengths and weaknesses, acquire skills, learn new information, and gain insight into perspectives that come from outside of your immediate circle. Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, you need time to decompress from frequently feeling overwhelmed. Even though I love what I do for a living, I still believe that without the process of rest, burnout is inevitable and any success that you achieve will not be very sustainable. Moreover, after completing a project or reaching a milestone, one of the best ways to improve your future work is to take a step back and allow yourself to identify where you excel as well as where improvement is necessary. If you are too fixated on working and believe that rest is an excuse for wasting time, I promise you that the quality of your work will be diminished, and you will end up sabotaging your goals.
To address what is perhaps an elephant in the room: this perspective may seem odd coming from me, given that I work for Gary Vaynerchuk, who is well-known for attributing his success to working 16–18 hours per day and is vocal about hustle and hard work being the most controllable variables to success. However, even he emphasizes the importance of sleep, and he is now vocal about dedicating his weekends to spending time with his family.
I personally make a serious effort to get 7–8 hours of sleep per night and work out every morning. Furthermore, before and after work, I will meet with friends, coworkers, or even random people from Instagram or LinkedIn that I think are doing interesting things. I feel that much of my happiness and micro successes (e.g. getting two full-time job offers right after graduating high school) would not be possible without these things. While the path to success is different for every individual, and what works for me might not work for everyone, I wanted to post this because I believe in the importance of finding the right balance between work and rest. Frankly, I think we’re entering a scary place where more and more people are attributing success to a lack of rest.
Before concluding, I would like to quickly give some credit to book a I recently read called Peak Performance by Steven Magness and Brad Stulberg, which gives a much more in-depth analysis of the ideas I’m discussing. I would highly recommend reading it (or listening to the audio book) if you’re interested in learning more about finding a balance between stress and rest and how it will help you operate at your best on a day-to-day basis.
