Sustainable pace
Before lockdown there was a static bike class I used to go regularly taught by the superbly named Tony Tempest. He loved to get us all to do a very long hill climb (often starting with Queen's One Vision - a great choice). His advice was always the same:
Try and get into a rhythm that you could keep up all day.
It's a great aspiration, and sometimes it really happened that I found a resistance level that meant, slow and steady, left foot and then right foot, I felt like I could have climbed and climbed.
This is also a great way for organisations to approach work.
High performing teams are great at generating value, reliably, in the long term. That's what makes them high performing. They don't just have a great day from time to time, they have a good day time after time. The analogy to elite sports here is the way in which being a great golfer or a great tennis player is about hitting the same good shot over and over. World class success is actually almost boring - that's how much it's about reliable repetition.
You cannot achieve this kind of reliability in an environment where everything is urgent all the time. If you are constantly spinning around, like you're in a hamster wheel, you will exhaust yourself. You will run out of energy, and need to slow down. You will get tired and your performance will suffer.
This can be uncomfortable for some founders, who might be the kind of people who will happily work an 80 hour week, as a consequence of their appetite for risk and reward, or their ability to become completely obsessed with some topic to the exclusion of everything else. But if that's you, remember how much of an outlier you are. Few people become founders, because few people have those qualities. You need other people if your organisation is going to succeed, and you need them to work at a pace that is sustainable for them, even if they are not business athletes in the way you are. Nobody benefits from burnout.
It's not just that getting exhausted is bad for individual human beings - although obviously it is and we should care about this. Not working at a sustainable pace also reduces the amount of work that gets produced overall. This is because if you are working hell-for-leather all the time, different people are going to run out of energy at different points in time. And because knowledge work is highly interconnected, the whole system of work effectively moves at the pace of the slowest person at any given point in time. In other words, the most burned out member of the team is the one that has the biggest impact on setting the overall pace.
It's so much better to find a pace where you're working hard, it's satisfying, you're achieving things - and you and your team mates can keep it up indefinitely. Better for you, and better for the organisation's ability to create value (and therefore to make money).
