Vishen Lakhiani argues that the culture of relentless hustle and overwork (the "lie of hustle") has a harmful "dark side," using anecdotes about Arianna Huffington's collapse from exhaustion and Elon Musk's extreme work habits to show that money and power alone are insufficient metrics of success. He calls for a third metric that prioritizes health and well-being so people can access wisdom, creativity, and relationships.
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Work hard like every waking hour. That's the thing I would say he's wrong, he's a genius, but he is so freaking wrong on this one. Just work like hell every week. All those things improve the odds of success. This is the dark side of vision. When you have a singular obsession and everything else, your love, relationships, your health, your sleep, all starts falling apart. Arianna Huffington spoke about this. Ariana had built a hundred million dollar valuation company, the Huffington Post. But she spoke about how one day she was walking back into her apartment in New York and she just collapsed from exhaustion on the way down, hit my head on my desk, broke my cheekbone, got four stitches on my right eye. And it started me on this journey of questioning what success is. Because by conventional definitions of success, which means two metrics, you know, money and power are successful by any insane definition of success. I was not successful if I was lying in a pool of blood on the floor of my office. She had bought into the lie of overwork. And this lie, I call it the lie of hustle. The lie of hard work permeates so many people who are driven. Elon Musk, he said brakes are for cars, not CEOs. And he also spoke about how he is going through excruciating pain right now as CEO of two companies. He can't sleep without the drug Ambien. He sometimes has to work till 3am he has already gone through two divorces. It's taking a toll on him. Arianna Huffington wrote a letter to Elon Musk, she said, because she had learned the lesson. As you told the New York Times, you've exhausted yourself working 120 hour weeks at the expense of seeing your children and your friends. You've had day long stretches where you shut yourself inside the Tesla factory and don't even go outside. You don't take vacations. There's no way you can connect with your amazing vision and creativity when you don't give yourself time to reconnect. Not just with those you love, but also with yourself and your wisdom. That is the dark side. Now, he said. He said, look, I don't have time. He's a genius, but he is so freaking wrong on this one. So really what I'm asking people to do is to realize that we need a third metric of success that includes our health and well being first of all. Because if we sacrifice that, what do we have? Our capacity to tap into our own wisdom, our own sense of wonder at the beauty of life that we so often miss and our capacity to give and be kind. Whatever our job in the world, whatever our dreams, we are bigger than that. And if we can find that who we really are and live from that place, life is truly amazing. No matter what the challenges and the obstacles. Yes. When you wake up, when you have this transformation, when you go from Elon Musk to Elon, plus the wisdom of Ariana in that metaphor, you start opening yourself up to so much more.
