>The most high-flying executives you can name from the Valley to the Street… I would bet that most have a family they would describe as being meaningfully engaged with.
They can describe all they want, but they have the same 24 hours a day as we all have (even if they're tweaked out of their mind like a certain one that cannot be mentioned in HN without a deluge of downvotes). If they're the archetypical high-performer working crazy hours, they are not spending that time with their family.
You can try to make yourself feel superior as much as you want, but yes: high performers often do both. They work hard and spend quality time with family.
I’m not going to psychologically diagnose someone here, but I have a feeling a lot of this inferiority complex comes from feeling insecure about lack of achievement in one’s career. So people cope by saying, “well I may not have a chart-topping career, but at least I spend time with my family, unlike that guy!”
When the reality is… yes, ambitious high flyers often have just as stable and living family lives as anyone else.
That's a lot of assumptions for someone supposedly not wanting to hand out psychological diagnoses based on a single comment on a online forum. I can online imagine the theses that would come out if you _were_ trying!
You can ad hominem all you want, but my central point remains: everyone has the same allotment of time. If you are spending it on something, that necessarily means you are not spending it on other things. That's just a fact and doesn't have moral judgements attached.
We do all have the same amount of time. But where there's inequality is in the productive (business and social/family) integral during that time.
Most people are likely at best using 25% of their 24h towards something high value. Say, 4 of their 8-9 working hours, and 1 in the morning and 3 after work are "good family time". The rest, their body and mind are in a low power state for efficiency or recovery.
Where the super-performers likely have an advantage is in a biological superiority that results in them needing less recovery time (perhaps life damages them on a cellular level less) and they have more energy-efficient or high-throughput caloric systems to be able to do more hours of high-impact work in the day.
We are learning more and more about mitochondrial differences between people. If you could do 8 hours of high-focus work every day, be super in-tune with people for 4 hours afterwards, and only need 4 hours of sleep to be completely recovered, you'd acheive a lot more over a year, or 10 years, than your peers.
This is completely un-controversial when talking about something like Pro Basketball: it's self-evident. But people don't want to acknowledge it may be a factor in programming or business leadership.
They can describe all they want, but they have the same 24 hours a day as we all have (even if they're tweaked out of their mind like a certain one that cannot be mentioned in HN without a deluge of downvotes). If they're the archetypical high-performer working crazy hours, they are not spending that time with their family.