Burnout is not a business strategy

Business Recorder · 22/10/2026، 1:48:41 PM

For much of the past two decades, Silicon Valley has done more than produce successful companies. It has shaped the global imagination of what entrepreneurship is supposed to look like. Success, according to this narrative, is measured in dizzying speed. Founders are expected to scale relentlessly, ‘embrace’ uncertainty, pursue venture capital and treat growth as the ultimate objective. Somewhere along the way, the modern entrepreneur also acquired an oddly specific lifestyle: waking at the crack of dawn, surviving on four hours of sleep, chugging protein shakes between investor calls, tracking every biometric imaginable, extolling the virtues of breathwork, cold plunges and the latest ayahuasca retreat, all while somehow remaining impeccably fit and endlessly productive. The entrepreneur who sacrifices almost everything else is not regarded as someone struggling to keep pace, but as someone sufficiently committed to their vision. Hence, exhaustion has become evidence of ambition. The influence of that philosophy extends far beyond California. Through books, podcasts, accelerator programmes and social media, it has become the dominant language of entrepreneurship and of a successful life almost everywhere. We have adopted its vocabulary so completely that we rarely pause to ask whether the assumptions beneath it hold true. This is not an argument against Silicon Valley…far from it. It has transformed industries, accelerated technological progress and produced companies that have fundamentally changed how we live and work. Nor is it an argument against ambition. Ambition has always been one of the most powerful drivers of innovation. It is, however, an argument for recognising that we have built and even romanticised a way of life the human body was never designed to sustain, and that the achievements we celebrate are being won at the cost of what constitutes a meaningful life. We are working with a body that took several million years to arrive at its current specif