How Should Founders Keep a Heavy Workload Sustainable?
Andrew Huberman says a heavy workload stays sustainable only if you treat it as an endurance event, not a series of all-out blitzes. Get the best work done twice a day and organize the day the way an athlete organizes training. One full day a week completely disengaged makes it easier to re-engage. His father, a scientist who worked at Xerox PARC, told him you have to be a long-distance runner.
The advice he calls the best he ever got came from Bob Knight, a neurologist at UC Berkeley and UCSF, when he was starting graduate school. Figure out the maximum amount of real work you can do every day consistently, then find a non-destructive way to reset every week. Knight resets by fishing. Huberman's reset is hiking in nature with other people. He kept to his own daily limit, five days a week, for 25 years, with a lighter stretch sometimes in the middle of the week.
People who take a ton of stimulants and blitz until they crash are the ones who disappear. Capacity has to be built. The work still has to be extremely hard and extremely focused. The missing piece is knowing how long that pace can be kept up.
