| > If I wasn’t tired, there’s no way I could be doing a great job at all of those things His point might have been that when you are tired your ability to do a great job is severely lessened compared to when you are not, this includes your ability to realistically evaluate how good of a job you are doing. Being tired means that you have impaired working memory, attention (especially vigilance), descision making abilities and general cognitive function. I can't think of a more important predictor to the ability to get work done for long periods of time than knowing how to manage your life and time enough to not be tired all the time. They don't give a shit about how many hours you work, they care about how much necessary work you get done. There's a trade-off to make here obviously, sometimes it's worth it. Some tasks can still be done if you are operating at 50% of your abilities, but if running a startup and parenting were that easy our world would be quite different. I won't speculate on the specific situation you talk about because I don't know the details and you do. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. That said, your post rubbed me the wrong way because it's too much like the common geek macho bullshit that's too common in this community. You can't bully your brain into working better just with a self-help pep talk full of bland aphorisms and completely ignorant of modern knowledge about health and productivity. And you might want to avoid the comparisons to athletics - elite athletes talk about and track their rest obsessively. They don't show up to a tryout injured and defensively complain when it's pointed out. |
And I should know better than to post any kind of general analogy as a way to illustrate a story here on HN with a bunch of smart people who'll punch holes in the technical impracticalities of such analogy... but yes, I took a negative word of "tired" and bent it to tell a story. Rest is important. Operating at 50% isn't good for the long haul.
I wasn't trying to suggest that being tired in a way that affects ongoing abilities to perform is a good thing. I just wanted to point out that if you just pop your head in to take a measurement of something, without the context of everything else going on, then that measurement might be off... ie, the investor seeing me as tired, without knowing it was because of the intensely productive and long week I had just come out of.