Jonathan Blow on work-life balance and working hard

Jonathan Blow, the game designer of The Witness and Braid, talks about work-life balance and the consequences of not working hard.

[zeidrichthorene]

The issue with work life balance is not about the work. It's about the agency. If I'm a programmer like John Carmack, and I want to work all night because I'm engaged and invested in the code I'm writing, I rest when I'm exhausted, then that's great. When John did his best work, it's not like he had a boss forcing him to do it. He was doing it himself, and not even forcing himself, he wanted to.

Now lets say that you want to be a world class athlete and go to the Olympics. This is the same thing. You'll push yourself, but not force yourself, because you're struggling to reach your goal of being the best, going to the olympics.

But now lets imagine the world class athlete again. You might be aware that a lot of olympic athletes end up working boring jobs. They work in food service, accounting, etc. These people have a lot of stuff to do to train. But is it good for them to then take double shifts at their restaurant, or work overtime at their accounting firm?

You might say that yeah, the athlete isn't aligned with the accounting job. So lets go back to the John Carmack example. Lets say John didn't found id software and instead got a job working as a programmer in a larger corporate modern game studio. Instead fast inverse square root functions to speed up doom computation he instead is forced to program to spec of a lead who is categorically dull. Maybe he is learning, but since he doesn't have the agency to be self directed, he can barely grow. When he goes home at night, maybe he works on his hobby projects. When he has to work overtime at his job, he loses out on that self-directed time.

So because of this, the issue with work life balance is not about "work". Lots of hobbies in other circumstances can be considered "work", but because you call them hobbies, they get found on the "life" side of the work life equation. Becoming an olympic athlete is not a hobby, but it's also not their day job. Work life balance is about how much you can control. You get to be an olympic athlete because you can control it. If you were forced to work 14 hour shifts 7 days a week at a fast food place, you would not have the required work life balance to become an olympic athlete.

So what happens when you are in a situation where you have autonomy to work and the fruit of your work can make a living for you? Well, in that case you are fully on the "life" side of work life balance as long as you are in pursuit of what is important to you. But when you get money involved, it gets easy to focus on money and comfort and safety. When you start to work out of fear, or when you start to work in response to other people's demands, you can quickly fall into the pattern that is not self directed.

The work I do, I could do after hours because I enjoy it. A problem with this is that not all of it is engaging, not all of it causes me to grow, a lot of it is very dull and frustrating because I'm solving problems that other people created for themselves. If I make a habit of doing this after hours, it sets expectations for other people that I they can demand that I do their stupid things. Now my work isn't entirely doing stupid things, but some of it is, and if I didn't set boundaries, my evenings would easily fill up with stupid things.

In the evening, I do personal work, similar to my work. I do a lot of programming on my own, a lot of investigation, a lot of research. I can only do this because I set boundaries at work. I think this is the difference. Right now, jonathan is in a position where his "work" is self directed. So it's not really work in the same way. When he gets exhausted, he can sleep. When he is interested in another concept, he can explore it. He is not stuck making enterprise middleware, he's making his own programming language and building game engines.

There is another side of this that can impact people like him, and that is where the work is driven by fear, and because of this you don't do things that are healthy for you. If you are not washing, not eating healthily, not sleeping, and you're doing it not because you're just entranced by the work, but because you are terrified that if you don't something bad will happen to you, and this lasts an extended period of time, it's bad, not just because it's unhealthy, but also because it will make you learn more slowly and work more poorly.

Work life balance isn't about working too hard. It's about ensuring you have the available time and energy to do the things that are important to you. When the stuff you call work is the stuff that is important to you, then work life balance is satisfied. This basically only happens if you're independently self sufficient or maybe self employed. Most people don't relate to that, but rather relate to an employee employer relationship where you don't work towards your goals, but to your employer's. In this case, work life balance is about ensuring you have that self directed time. If you want your employees to feel this way as an employer, you need to not just let them do the thing that they love, but give them control over it and ironically give them the capacity to set boundaries.

[KilgoreTroutAsf]

Some thoughts in no particular order:
1) programming is physically taxing. bad posture and lack of exercise tend to compound pretty fast into actual health problems. ignore your body at your own peril.
2) breaks and downtime are important for your mental well-being, concentration and ability to think creatively. smashing your head against a brick wall for hours can be extremely unproductive considering some of the best solutions come to you while showering, taking a walk, sitting in a cafe, etc.
3) not every project / aspect of your work is equally important. it is just as or even more important to be able to identify the 20% of work that gives you 80% of the profits and then maybe move on the the next thing, or at least be aware your time and energy are finite and prioritizing is key.
4) family, friends, etc. are not background decoration in your life

If you can balance all of these effectively, by all means work 100 hour weeks on your passion projects. God knows I have done it at many points in my life. Just remember real productivity is not a function of how many hours you clock in, but how many PRODUCTIVE hours you clock in.

[aaronwinter]

I work a 40 hour week as a programmer yet I learn more about programming in my free time than at work.

[fennecbesixdouze]

The concept of work-life balance, if it has any legitimacy, is actually about one thing and one thing only: ownership. And I don't mean "ownership" as in "your boss gives you the 'autonomy' to make your own decisions and then he still owns all the work you produce". I mean ownership as in actual property-rights ownership.

"Work" is the stuff you do as villein to enrich your liege lord/employer. "Life" is the stuff you own yourself.

The only reason to produce code for a wage, that someone else is going to own the IP rights to, is if you need to pay rent and groceries and your heating bill, but haven't accumulated enough capital to work for yourself. I.e. you are basically a villein who hasn't earned enough to purchase your way out of your oath of fealty and become a freeman.

John Carmack didn't work 80 hours a week to produce someone else's intellectual property and enrich someone else. He worked 0 hours per week producing intellectual property for others. He was the co-founder of id. He had ownership over everything he produced. Every single hour of labor he exerted was directly benefiting and enriching himself.

Unless you are being paid untold sums of money to do it, no one in the West should ever work more than 40 hours a week for an employer. Is your wage going to make you as wealthy as producing and owning Doom? No? Then don't work as hard for your employer as John Carmack did for himself. The goal is working 0 hours for the benefit of someone else.

Jonathan owns Braid outright, and he founded Thekla. He worked very briefly as a software developer for an employer after he dropped out of Berkeley, and he was terrible at it and hated it, and then founded his own games company with a friend. Essentially his entire working career he has never worked for an employer.

Blow works 0 hours for an employer, that's 40 hours less than the "work life balance" people he's criticizing. His ratio of work to life balance is 0% work, 100% life, and that is the ideal ratio for a human being.

If every hour you spend on labor is directly benefiting you, and you have property ownership rights over every line of code you write, then why in the hell wouldn't you work 80 hours a week or more?

[fennecbesixdouze]

Watch the Lex Friedman podcast with Carmack. Carmack never remotely did any some sort of "olympic training".

The dude barely woke up before noon throughout most of his life. He's 52 now and he's saying he's "trying to push his schedule back to wake up at 8am", had been waking up at 10am even in his late 40's. He talks about how he'd roll into the office at 2pm half the time at id. Yeah he'd nerd out until late at night drinking diet coke, but not because he was "working hard", because he was doing everything for himself on whatever he was interested in.

This is no olympic athlete, this is just somebody who his whole life got to work on absolutely whatever the hell he wanted that he was interested in himself. His entire life he has worked for himself enriching himself, on whatever schedule he wants. Work means the stuff you do for an employer, life means the stuff you do for yourself, and by that token Carmack has never had any "work-life balance", he's been 100% his own life. He's never had to work a job for an employer, he's always been lucky enough to work for solely for his own benefit and his own interests. In his 20's that was for himself at id which he owned, now at Occulus it's making millions and millions to be given totally free reign as a consulting CTO, again in practice working just for himself.

I don't know when Blow wakes up, but Blow is the same. The dude has barely worked a day in his life for an employer. He dropped out of college. He quit his real programming job and started a games company almost immediately to do just what he was interested in. His whole career has been 0% work 100% his own life and his own interests. That is the ideal work-life balance: 0% work for other people, 100% everything for yourself and your own company that you own.

[beanboi]

Most people don't care about their job. There's not that much meaningful work to do. Most of it is non-sense for the sake of it. Carmack and Blow work for themselves on their own projects for their own personal success.

[infernoglass_]

"work-life balance" is oppressor speak. work is an essential part of life. It's just that most "work" is subordinating yourself to a master who controls everything you do i.e. having a "job". Real work is creative and self directed. The term "work" has been made synonymous with slavery and now we lack the language to even express the notion.

[th_CAV_Trooper]

I can't imagine getting tired after 6 hours. Since 1978 you can't drag me away from the computer with wild horses. Loved this rant.

[tim-harding]

I love the pragmatism here. No shame for people who don't want that lifestyle, but also acknowledgement of where and for whom it is appropriate.

[SEOTADEO]

I think very few people even really strive to belong to the best, and those who do, are working all the time automatically without thinking much about it, because the interest in the work keeps you going.

[fietspompje]

Im not sure if the analogy works with olympic atheletes.
Most of them do not train for more than a few hours a day, simply because doing more results in overtraining which will make your body deteriorate.
Many even have jobs next to their training.

[Matthew-bevh]

JB does great work but you should never take advice on work-life balance from a 50 year old man without a wife or kids. His life is making games.

[sandeeptech]

here is my take:
I don't care about my employer's problems. I have tried to find some meaning in those tasks but at the end of the day they all feel superficial to me. Its simple transactional to be, you buy my dev time, simple, no culture bullshit, plain old transaction. So I don't feel right when I have to work over time, instead I feel very bad about it. And overwork is a norm in my country (India) that too without fair compensation.
I can put my being into work if I find it meaningful but they can never be someone else's ideas. Not average ones.

[plaidchuck]

It’s not linear my dude in the real world. Complain about it as much as you want but it won’t change.

This is the problem with the redpill sigma grind mindset, thinking doing xyz will guarantee xyz and then being mad and lashing out and blaming society because the result didn’t match your expectations. It’s a type of entitlement just as bad as people expecting things when not putting the work in.

The world has never been nor will ever be meritocratic. Goodness and hard work and following the rules sometimes are not rewarded. Deal with it

[SimGunther]

9:49 Spaced repetition in the context of active recall is a great studying tactic. Not sure why Jonathan doesn't take solace in Anki...

[trashaccount]

On the athlete comparison: Muscles grow during the rest after training. So athletes actually benefit from resting well.

[TranscendentPhoenix]

There's a lot of good advice and truth here. "Work harder = more skill" is mostly true, and I think that's the key point here. I think that the idea that "work harder = more money" AS A LINEAR FUNCTION or better than linear (mentioned after the halfway point) is just plainly misguided though. That's just not how it works a lot of the time. That would be exceedingly fair, and life isn't fair. So I think you definitely need to differentiate between different outputs, and not just treat money(work hrs), skill(work hrs), or whatever else as equivalent functions. There's also just lots of factors besides hard work, including shifting economic conditions etc when it comes to some of these like money. I think the real issue is that people use all these functions as excuses not to try or work hard, and that's not good.

[foreversleepy]

I'm convinced that if I got married and had a kid back in my late teens/early twenties, (currently 25) I wouldn't have learnt how to program at all, at least at a competent level because it already takes me forever to really master a concept as a bachelor. Lmao.

[JrIcify]

Important thing to note here is Jonathan Blow doesn't have a family. Maybe I'm wrong about that but I've never heard him talk about his wife or kids and google doesn't say anything about it.

[adamhenriksson]

I really really disagree with that definition of burnout. You can be a total success, but the crunch and deadlines to get there can be mentally exhausting to the point of burnout even if you love what you do. One of the consequences of burnout is that you stop enjoying the work you previously enjoyed, so "just enjoy work and be successful" is backward.

And also, repeated short breaks and spaced repetition make sense, it has been scientifically tested and proven to help with productivity and learning for just about everyone. "Psychological muscles" is not even a thing that exists, it's at best a myth, just as "training willpower" is just a myth that has been disproven with the same types of long-term experiments that gave rise to the theory of willpower in the first place.

It seems like Jon is convinced that "You can work long hours if you just do it", I say that's BS and instead "You can work long hours if you dedicate your life to it". If you build your job around your passion/interest, build yourself and your life to support your work maximally, and not working past the point of mental fatigue (like you do when you have crunch, crushing deadlines, etc. ), you will work maximally. If you just work more just to be able to work more, you WILL burn out. Also, if you are living a healthy lifestyle you can put in more dedicated hours where your mind is focused because you have the energy to do so. Build your life around your work.

The tradeoff thing makes sense, but the tradeoff is less like "Either you put in the hours or you travel", and more like "If you build your life around the fun things you want to do in life, you cannot build your life around your work, and you then cannot be maximally productive ever".

All the great inventors of history dedicated their life to their work, they did not just "work more". The "dedicated their lives to" part cannot be understated.