Most of American management cannot tell the difference between motion and progress.

While I don't want to dismiss your extra effort as improving your results, I suspect that the value placed on your behavior by management may have been out of proportion with objective truth.

I'm also concerned with whether you were Defecting, in a Prisoner's Dilemma sense. Management always sets unreasonable deadlines as long as anybody agrees with them. Only when people are unanimous that this is crazy do they ever seem to back off.

My role has always been to put out fires.

Typical examples would be a client says "Oh no, our campaign that was supposed to start next Monday just fell through - we need a solution ASAP!"

or

"Our project is six months past deadline with no end in sight..."

For some, this is an unreasonable situation to find themself in. For me, I look at such situations as opportunities. The client's management is under a ton of pressure to fix things immediately and a lot of the internal friction that exists for the employees doesn't exist for me as an outsider. I'm allowed to stick my finger in the wound.

Still, you're absolutely right that management (and it's not in any way limited to the US - I've helped clients across North America, Europe, and Asia who all had the exact same problems) can be unreasonable. I wish I knew a good solution for that, but the truth is that there's a fairly small percentage of people that are actually good managers and there's an enormous amount of political nonsense where managers try to justify their own existence by carving out little kingdoms for themselves.

I mean, congrats, but if you retired comfortably in your 20s you got crazy lucky - that kind of rapid wealth acquisition isn't skill based. I used to work in the game industry getting peanuts for the same hours, we made amazing things in crunch that I am proud of, but when we started to scale back hours our product got even better because we lowered the stress and increased the healthiness of our workplace.

> that kind of rapid wealth acquisition isn't skill based.

This is just nonsense and reflects a desire to dismiss the capabilities and accomplishments of others because they don't reflect your self-pitying worldview.

Chances are that the above poster did something you're unable or unwilling to do -- and the difference in outcomes is reflective of that.

The unfortunate truth of our modern economy is that skills are neither necessary nor sufficient for the outcome described. They may have been the deciding factor in this case, as may the hours worked, but calling that shot in advance is not trivial.

If you could have worked twice as many hours and made twice as much money - would you? That was the position I found myself in, and that's how I got where I am. I never claimed to have a secret skill.

1. It would have been physically impossible for me to do so since I was already working 10-12 hour days pretty often and without sleep I'd be worthless.

2. Double income isn't necessarily that much income, if you're making 35k giving up sleeping to get 70k seems like a pretty poor trade.

Also, no, never. I would never work twice as many hours (assuming we're taking a base number of hours between 6 and 8) for twice the pay. You effectively earn less money (due to graduated taxes) and you have to give up all the creature comforts of life. Going from working 8 hours a day to 16 hours a day would drastically lower the enjoyment I got from life and probably end up killing me from stress.

I suppose everyone's situation is different. I was self-employed and had the opportunity to just work more and earn more at the time. The luck part of that equation is that I wasn't earning 35k, but I'm sure there are people on this forum earning more than I was at peak regardless.

I personally really enjoy working, and never felt that working 80+ hours was a burden. To be honest I actually look forward to getting up and getting to it most days.

With all that said, the growth I had just wouldn't have been possible on 40 hours a week of work. So I credit the long hours with the creation of a lot of the luck and opportunity I experienced in my life.

> You effectively earn less money (due to graduated taxes)

A personal bugbear of mine: your point is directionally correct but expressed incorrectly. Under marginal tax rates you do not earn less money. You take home less per hour past a certain point, but are still earning more overall.

I'd be a lot less bothered about people getting this wrong if it hadn't been turned into a political football in recent memory.

"Man.

Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money.

Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health.

And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present;

the result being that he does not live in the present or the future;

he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived."

You're describing my dad perfectly. He worked as much as I do (plus he was doing hard physical labor...) until he died of cancer in 2009. He's the reason I dedicated myself to work as much as I could as early as I could, so I could get myself to a point of financial independence. He never got to enjoy his retirement because he sacrificed his life to adopt me, so I feel a sense of urgency to enjoy life as much as I can in his honor.

That is a Dalai Lama quote, and it's the only one that has really stuck with me.

It's so true it hurts.