Intensity is a characteristic of the winners of races. Most profitable niches are competitions for market share devoured by whoever delivers first and best. It's hard to be on the right side of a zero sum survival game without treating seconds like gold bullion.
Startup success comes from making a product that customers will pay for. Full stop. Intensity can be a way to find that, but no amount of intensity will change the fact that most startups make products that no one wants to pay for.
If you're a founder with a significant equity stake in your company then by all means, go balls to the wall. It's pretty dumb to expect employees with a significantly more capped upside to do the same.
Agreed in general, ties in with something I've been mulling over.
I'd honestly like to be able to put more effort into my job, but as a salaried engineer extra effort doesn't pay off on its own. I have to spend more effort making sure it's seen come bonus/raise time, since my outcome is largely dependent on what my boss thinks of me, not what I've actually produced.
Founders get a much more direct line to work and outcome -- but I guess they trade stability, and maybe even the perception game just shifts to investors.
Yeah - the only time it's worth it is if you're also learning. I volunteer extra time when a project really teaches me something new (or there's some fire and we need all hands, but that's rare).
This year I had the chance to learn IaC and generally using AWS through a project, but I had to donate a bunch of my time learning. Now that's 2 things I can claim I have worked with in production. But fixing bugs and general dev work, no thanks.
I've done a few types of jobs myself and unfortunately not really found offer frameworks that look like "capped downside and uncapped(ish) upside" based on performance.
Ideally what many senior engineers are probably looking for is - I can live on 50-75% of my TC a few years without setting myself too far back, and I'd work really hard on an interesting project that has a >25% chance of rewarding me 2-4xTC. It is not too expensive to roll that dice, and I have a reasonable chance of hitting in one career.
Instead we get a lot of lottery ticket profile things that are like "1% chance of 1000xTC". The EV looks good, but you don't get enough rolls of the dice for that 1% to pay off in a single lifetime let along career.
I sympathize with the author, but instead of intensity, I would describe it as externally-observable emotional engagement (though that is a mouthful by comparison). Success follows founders who care deeply about their mission, customers, product, and people, and who succeed in getting other people to care deeply as well.
It is such a stark contrast from corporate culture, where you survive and get promoted by learning to disengage from the mission, customers, and product, and focus on being quietly, not intensely, useful for your boss.
I've worked remote for the last 6 years, at startups or otherwise.
This is somewhat written for a CEO: "you must bring intensity and instill it on your blank-slate employees". In one case there's the assumption that onsite startups work better, and that assumed-to-be-true mystery is explained as being from on-site being higher intensity.
I somewhat caution against that mindset. I find myself frequently more intense about driving feature timelines and rollouts than my colleagues, even when I'm remote. It's part of the nature of me not my office chair.
I think intensity is a symptom of circumstance not a cause for them.
If you're a startup that's on the verge of transitioning from broke to huge success, I'd imagine everyone would be bringing a lot of intensity to push it over that line.
If you're an established company with a track record of responding to record profits with layoffs, then I don't think it's fair for you to expect your employees to share your enthusiasm.
Absolutely survivorship bias, as well as - intensity on the right things / right direction / level of decision making are important.
Go yell at your C-suite / directors with equity that have/will have F-you money from the success of the business. Don't think your ICs 3 levels down the hierarchy making 1-3x inflation-level raises will be as driven.
There's a problem where intensity can easily slide into ruthlessness. Cultivating a society of impact that degrades overall flourishing seems like a bad recipe to me. Even if it works out for some by the usual measures.
In Buddhism, there's a saying: "though the view should be as vast as the sky, keep your conduct as fine as barley flour" - Padmasambhava. Having that attitude combined with an intensely focused engagement in building is an overall better path.
Nice comment. I agree. This mentality of "push push now now" can just end up meaning you break things. You break yourself, your colleagues and your family. You might even break your company. I'd even call it a bit immature. We need to remember that the present moment is all we will ever have. To only look into the future is to miss out on life. Would a good idea not survive in a "non-intense" a.k.a a grown up startup? I doubt it.
> If you consider how impossible the startup journey is, it stands to reason that only through intensity can something be created out of thin air that grows to be worth billions of dollars in just a few years.
It is sad to me that this is the benchmark for so many people. It is only a success if it is worth billions.
I would say it's not intensity alone, but intensity towards a vision. Working hard by itself is never enough, but working hard to create something valuable, that only you can see requires intensity.
A lot of people don't realize they want something until they've seen it. So founders have intensity, and vision for a need only they can see.
Imagine that slow-paced DMV with a lot of intensity, but towards nothing at all. In that case, the vision should be efficiency (without burning out employees).
If you choose to define intensity as the ability/willingness to turn other knobs to 11 (which is what the author does), then its not unexpected to see correlation of "intensity" and "success".
As long as the other knobs show a generally positive relationship between input and output, then obviously turning the knobs up will generally result in higher output.
The questions are:
* What are the downsides of turning up the knob? Both in terms of the specific knobs you're turning, as well as "going to 11" in a more general sense.
* Why do people and organizations find it difficult to turn the knob to 11?
My take is that intensity is painful. This brings two things that have to be overcome:
You must somehow build a pain tolerant organization. You can do this by selecting for pain tolerant people, by inoculating a mission/message that positively improves pain tolerance (make people believe that it's worth it), by creating organizational structures that attenuates the pain feedback loop (ie, somehow insulate decision makers from the pain, while finding ways to mitigate or work around the pain where it is felt... ie, probably just accepting the churn) or other means.
The other thing to overcome is that pain is supposed to be instructive, and provide useful negative feedback. As you build up your pain tolerance, you ideally are still able to extract real information from the pain signals. If you achieve pain tolerance through blocking off or ignoring all pain signals, then you are probably at higher risk of just... doing stupid things.
> * What are the downsides of turning up the knob?
I once worked at a relatively small (<1000) person firm that basically had a near extinction event due to failing to fund a secondary datacenter / sensible data backup / business continuity strategy for years (despite engineering raising the alarm).
A team of 20 engineers worked 16 hour days for 2 weeks through the weekend to rescue them from their own decisions.
At the end of it they had a 10 minute zoom with the team to thank us and tell us they were going to - send us a ($10) bottle of wine, and grant "2 days off in lieu" (we were already on "unlimited vacation" plan) for the extra ~14 days of work.
That was a single-use only knob due to their behaviour.
No one cared enough again to do anything above & beyond, morale went to zero, and senior members of the team had all left within a year. The thank-you was so bad it was probably better that they not have done one at all.
I've felt this sense of intensity myself in things I really cared about and pursued, and have usually succeeded in those things. But it is difficult to manufacture. I have seen what has seemed to be an attempt to manufacture/enforce intensity among employees in a startup environment. I believe the strategy caused more harm than good to both the employees and the product.
There is an old idea: if you must spend your time doing anything at all, do it well. Everyone shows up to work to take care of their basic needs. Once the needs are met, personal quality becomes a factor.
I think the causal relationship is often the reverse: When things are going well your limiting constraints move from outside the company (e.g. long sales cycles) to inside (e.g. engineering, operations). That feels a lot more intense because founders / board / investors are focused internally and driving up intensity, as that is the limiting factor for company success. When it’s not going so well the intensity stays more in the board room.
There are many roads to succes, and I think a sort of single-minded ruthlessness (or, yes, more charitably “intensity”) can be a fairly simple one.
But I believe that that ruthlessness is the source of a lot of suffering caused by, and happening inside of, companies.
I think it’s really important to try to find a way to be successful that doesn’t just involve being obsessive and single-minded, and if you’re unwilling to do that you’re letting yourself off the hook in a bad way.
I can not hear my own thoughts around "intense people". Usually it means hours of emotional labour and office drama, on top of heavy development work. It is the main reason I refuse to work in office now.
The article quotes Apple like 5 times, and the only "non intensive" counter example is DMV office.
My take is that "intensity" is toxic, and Musk and Jobs succeeded DESPITE of it. Because both were technicality brilliant people, that offsets their "intensive" toxicity!
The linked tweet about remote vs in-person is hilarious to me.
I've never witnessed anything else affect intensity in my teams as negatively as forced RTO did.
I mean of course it is fully dependent on personalities and roles, and totally anecdotal, but in my experience, work was certainly *much* more intense when people had conditions for deep focus. I was literally just thinking about how slow everything feels nowadays, with everybody struggling to get focus time in a crowded office full of distractions.
A lot of intensity is just people in charge having status seeking goals that were formed at a young age.
It may surprise people here, but there are teenagers who set out with 10-20 year goals like "I want to found a startup / be a CEO / have my own venture fund / etc" and then make every educational/career/relationship/lifestyle decision in that context.
For most people we want to work on interesting projects that pay us enough to live the lifestyle we can enjoy.
I think this is why a lot of successful founder types come from upper middle class backgrounds. If your dad is a mechanic then "being good with computers and going to college" is an aspirational goal.
If your parents were first in their family to go to college then "go to a nationally known college and working at a Fortune 500" is an aspirational goal. If your dad went to an Ivy and runs his own business then the aspirational goals you have instilled in you are much higher.
The hardest thing with intensity is narrowing the focus, which Slootman notes as important. The best intensity is extremely focused. Which, ironically, in my experience, doesn't even feel that intense in the moment, time just flies.
I can see this. In the areas in my life that I have been most intense, I have been most successful (despite not being the most talented at it relative to other areas in my life).
From my 15 years being involved in startups, I would agree with this. Especially in marketing teams, which has been my area. There is no right answer which can be confirmed easily so you just have to really really care.
I will also say this is not the same as hard work. Hours and intensity is not the same. I would be considered a very successful person by most, but I have never "worked" more than 30 hours a week. But I've cared very very intensely about the results of the work that I'm doing.
You also can't expect it of employees unless you're paying them a fuck ton/have incentives.
Intensity, in my experience, is required for success. But lots of intensity is cosmetic. And there are lots of people whose intensity isn't focused on productive things. But no mistake, intensity in the service of genuine productivity and value is a recipe for success in all walks of life.
The Michael Jordan documentary The Last Dance is a great example of this. His intensity, focus, and arrogance was maniacal. And the result was that he alienated almost everyone around him and seems to have few friends. Steve Jobs, as mentioned in the blog, was similar. And so the world is full of sociopaths mimicking their worst, alienating behaviors, mistakenly thinking that is the secret sauce.
I'm friends with a semi-retired public high school basketball coach who is broadly considered a "living legend". He won 19 state championships, 1300 games, and is a part-time assistant even in his 70s. His winning percentage over his entire career is in excess of 90%, which is simply an absurd accomplishment. He's universally loved by his players, his peers, and his assistants.
As the son of a successful basketball coach (and have another HS Hall-of-Fame caliber coach in the family), I'm familiar with the passion and intensity of successful coaches. I know the hours they put in, the focus they demand, and how the best coaches build programs, not teams. I know how they commonly hate losing much more than they enjoy winning.
But this "legend" I know, on the surface, seems an outlier in both success and behavior.
He's broadly known for his calm, cool demeanor. He has only received two technical fouls in his career, one for a clerical error and the other for a technicality. He doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't get excited or upset. He's "mild-mannered" in a world of red-faced, hyper-competitive rage monsters. If it weren't for his peerless success, his mild temperament would probably be viewed as a liability.
He's generous with his time and energy, willing to share his knowledge and experience with anyone who will listen.
But underneath that calm demeanor, I have been able to discern that the man I know carries an endless, constant, never-satisfied intensity that demands the best from players, schools, and parents alike. He's examining every angle. He's using every moment afforded to him for maximum effect. Even if there is a day off, it's in service of a bigger plan.
He sees how all the little habits, the little behaviors, and little efforts achieve big goals in aggregate. He watches 7th grade B-teams practice to make sure everything is done right, that the coaches are investing in each player appropriately, and each player is investing in themselves. He's conducting a symphony and passionately ensuring each note is being played as best it can.
He's also very straightforward, to his players, to their parents, to the administration, and to anyone that will listen. He knows what he wants from his players in practice, in the game, and in all other avenues of their lives. He sets lofty but attainable goals for each of them. He doesn't sugar coat anything. He is willing to tell the truth even when a lie would be easier. But that truth is always in the same calm, cool demeanor he coaches with.
His ability to direct his intensity productively is world class. I don't think it's any surprise that other extremely high achievers, like Steve Jobs, were able to do the same. But he's proof you don't have to treat people poorly to succeed at the highest level in your field.
I'd honestly like to be able to put more effort into my job, but as a salaried engineer extra effort doesn't pay off on its own. I have to spend more effort making sure it's seen come bonus/raise time, since my outcome is largely dependent on what my boss thinks of me, not what I've actually produced.
Founders get a much more direct line to work and outcome -- but I guess they trade stability, and maybe even the perception game just shifts to investors.
This year I had the chance to learn IaC and generally using AWS through a project, but I had to donate a bunch of my time learning. Now that's 2 things I can claim I have worked with in production. But fixing bugs and general dev work, no thanks.
Ideally what many senior engineers are probably looking for is - I can live on 50-75% of my TC a few years without setting myself too far back, and I'd work really hard on an interesting project that has a >25% chance of rewarding me 2-4xTC. It is not too expensive to roll that dice, and I have a reasonable chance of hitting in one career.
Instead we get a lot of lottery ticket profile things that are like "1% chance of 1000xTC". The EV looks good, but you don't get enough rolls of the dice for that 1% to pay off in a single lifetime let along career.
It is such a stark contrast from corporate culture, where you survive and get promoted by learning to disengage from the mission, customers, and product, and focus on being quietly, not intensely, useful for your boss.
This is somewhat written for a CEO: "you must bring intensity and instill it on your blank-slate employees". In one case there's the assumption that onsite startups work better, and that assumed-to-be-true mystery is explained as being from on-site being higher intensity.
I somewhat caution against that mindset. I find myself frequently more intense about driving feature timelines and rollouts than my colleagues, even when I'm remote. It's part of the nature of me not my office chair.
I think intensity is a symptom of circumstance not a cause for them.
If you're a startup that's on the verge of transitioning from broke to huge success, I'd imagine everyone would be bringing a lot of intensity to push it over that line.
If you're an established company with a track record of responding to record profits with layoffs, then I don't think it's fair for you to expect your employees to share your enthusiasm.
Go yell at your C-suite / directors with equity that have/will have F-you money from the success of the business. Don't think your ICs 3 levels down the hierarchy making 1-3x inflation-level raises will be as driven.
In Buddhism, there's a saying: "though the view should be as vast as the sky, keep your conduct as fine as barley flour" - Padmasambhava. Having that attitude combined with an intensely focused engagement in building is an overall better path.
It is sad to me that this is the benchmark for so many people. It is only a success if it is worth billions.
A lot of people don't realize they want something until they've seen it. So founders have intensity, and vision for a need only they can see.
Imagine that slow-paced DMV with a lot of intensity, but towards nothing at all. In that case, the vision should be efficiency (without burning out employees).
As long as the other knobs show a generally positive relationship between input and output, then obviously turning the knobs up will generally result in higher output.
The questions are:
* What are the downsides of turning up the knob? Both in terms of the specific knobs you're turning, as well as "going to 11" in a more general sense.
* Why do people and organizations find it difficult to turn the knob to 11?
My take is that intensity is painful. This brings two things that have to be overcome:
You must somehow build a pain tolerant organization. You can do this by selecting for pain tolerant people, by inoculating a mission/message that positively improves pain tolerance (make people believe that it's worth it), by creating organizational structures that attenuates the pain feedback loop (ie, somehow insulate decision makers from the pain, while finding ways to mitigate or work around the pain where it is felt... ie, probably just accepting the churn) or other means.
The other thing to overcome is that pain is supposed to be instructive, and provide useful negative feedback. As you build up your pain tolerance, you ideally are still able to extract real information from the pain signals. If you achieve pain tolerance through blocking off or ignoring all pain signals, then you are probably at higher risk of just... doing stupid things.
I once worked at a relatively small (<1000) person firm that basically had a near extinction event due to failing to fund a secondary datacenter / sensible data backup / business continuity strategy for years (despite engineering raising the alarm).
A team of 20 engineers worked 16 hour days for 2 weeks through the weekend to rescue them from their own decisions.
At the end of it they had a 10 minute zoom with the team to thank us and tell us they were going to - send us a ($10) bottle of wine, and grant "2 days off in lieu" (we were already on "unlimited vacation" plan) for the extra ~14 days of work.
That was a single-use only knob due to their behaviour.
No one cared enough again to do anything above & beyond, morale went to zero, and senior members of the team had all left within a year. The thank-you was so bad it was probably better that they not have done one at all.
But I believe that that ruthlessness is the source of a lot of suffering caused by, and happening inside of, companies.
I think it’s really important to try to find a way to be successful that doesn’t just involve being obsessive and single-minded, and if you’re unwilling to do that you’re letting yourself off the hook in a bad way.
The article quotes Apple like 5 times, and the only "non intensive" counter example is DMV office.
My take is that "intensity" is toxic, and Musk and Jobs succeeded DESPITE of it. Because both were technicality brilliant people, that offsets their "intensive" toxicity!
I've never witnessed anything else affect intensity in my teams as negatively as forced RTO did.
I mean of course it is fully dependent on personalities and roles, and totally anecdotal, but in my experience, work was certainly *much* more intense when people had conditions for deep focus. I was literally just thinking about how slow everything feels nowadays, with everybody struggling to get focus time in a crowded office full of distractions.
I'm much more focused when I am left alone. no one in sight.
It may surprise people here, but there are teenagers who set out with 10-20 year goals like "I want to found a startup / be a CEO / have my own venture fund / etc" and then make every educational/career/relationship/lifestyle decision in that context.
For most people we want to work on interesting projects that pay us enough to live the lifestyle we can enjoy.
I think this is why a lot of successful founder types come from upper middle class backgrounds. If your dad is a mechanic then "being good with computers and going to college" is an aspirational goal.
If your parents were first in their family to go to college then "go to a nationally known college and working at a Fortune 500" is an aspirational goal. If your dad went to an Ivy and runs his own business then the aspirational goals you have instilled in you are much higher.
Bezos was the same.
Start today. Start now.
I will also say this is not the same as hard work. Hours and intensity is not the same. I would be considered a very successful person by most, but I have never "worked" more than 30 hours a week. But I've cared very very intensely about the results of the work that I'm doing.
You also can't expect it of employees unless you're paying them a fuck ton/have incentives.
The Michael Jordan documentary The Last Dance is a great example of this. His intensity, focus, and arrogance was maniacal. And the result was that he alienated almost everyone around him and seems to have few friends. Steve Jobs, as mentioned in the blog, was similar. And so the world is full of sociopaths mimicking their worst, alienating behaviors, mistakenly thinking that is the secret sauce.
I'm friends with a semi-retired public high school basketball coach who is broadly considered a "living legend". He won 19 state championships, 1300 games, and is a part-time assistant even in his 70s. His winning percentage over his entire career is in excess of 90%, which is simply an absurd accomplishment. He's universally loved by his players, his peers, and his assistants.
As the son of a successful basketball coach (and have another HS Hall-of-Fame caliber coach in the family), I'm familiar with the passion and intensity of successful coaches. I know the hours they put in, the focus they demand, and how the best coaches build programs, not teams. I know how they commonly hate losing much more than they enjoy winning.
But this "legend" I know, on the surface, seems an outlier in both success and behavior.
He's broadly known for his calm, cool demeanor. He has only received two technical fouls in his career, one for a clerical error and the other for a technicality. He doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't get excited or upset. He's "mild-mannered" in a world of red-faced, hyper-competitive rage monsters. If it weren't for his peerless success, his mild temperament would probably be viewed as a liability.
He's generous with his time and energy, willing to share his knowledge and experience with anyone who will listen.
But underneath that calm demeanor, I have been able to discern that the man I know carries an endless, constant, never-satisfied intensity that demands the best from players, schools, and parents alike. He's examining every angle. He's using every moment afforded to him for maximum effect. Even if there is a day off, it's in service of a bigger plan.
He sees how all the little habits, the little behaviors, and little efforts achieve big goals in aggregate. He watches 7th grade B-teams practice to make sure everything is done right, that the coaches are investing in each player appropriately, and each player is investing in themselves. He's conducting a symphony and passionately ensuring each note is being played as best it can.
He's also very straightforward, to his players, to their parents, to the administration, and to anyone that will listen. He knows what he wants from his players in practice, in the game, and in all other avenues of their lives. He sets lofty but attainable goals for each of them. He doesn't sugar coat anything. He is willing to tell the truth even when a lie would be easier. But that truth is always in the same calm, cool demeanor he coaches with.
His ability to direct his intensity productively is world class. I don't think it's any surprise that other extremely high achievers, like Steve Jobs, were able to do the same. But he's proof you don't have to treat people poorly to succeed at the highest level in your field.