Rules for the long game of work

I’ve recently realized that in work, as in many other areas of life, the real gains only come in the long run. By “gains,” I mean a combination of impact, fulfillment, and wealth.

While this realization may not be surprising, what is often overlooked are two non-negotiable rules that must be followed by those who want to reap the full benefits of a long-term career.

To enjoy the wonders of work in the long run, you must:

1. be able to continue doing work for that time;

2. work in a way that is conducive to exponential dynamics.

In this post, I’ll elaborate on these two rules for the long game of work.

Continue doing work

This first rule is obvious. So obvious that most people don’t give it a second thought.

Will Larson wrote a great post called A forty-year career, where he argues that the biggest barrier to a long-term career is burnout. Therefore, respecting rule #1 implies avoiding burnout at all costs.

There are many dimensions to burnout, and my objective here is not to elaborate on them¹. What recently struck me is that a key component of successfully staying away from burnout is learning to pace yourself. If you’re playing the long-term game, managing your pace is one of your most important responsibilities.

By being inside the startup echo chamber, for example, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking about your job as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hit jackpot. You might start thinking that if you work crazy hard for a few years, you’ll not only leave a positive mark on the world but also collect a bag of life-changing money as a reward.

You may think that you’re only sacrificing the short-term, which feels noble and responsible. However, what ends up happening is that by working at an unsustainable pace, the impact of your work will look like a spike followed by a decay. The steeper and more enduring the decay, the more you are compromising in the long run.

(A career of spikes and decays.)

Pacing yourself and working hard are not mutually exclusive. To produce the best work possible, hard work is indispensable, but you need to be mindful of the pace at which you can do it. You need to develop enough awareness to modulate the intensity as needed².

I like how Will Larson puts it in his post: “let’s be real, the quality of your overall work is going to mirror your mental health.”

Work that is conducive to exponentials

Continuing to work in the long run is a required but insufficient condition for achieving ever-increasing impact. It’s wishful thinking to expect things to change in the future if you just sit around all day and don’t put much thought into what you’re doing.

Thinking from first principles, exponential dynamics happen when the rate of progress in an area is proportional to the amount of a resource you already have. To experience exponential progress in work, the work you did in the past needs to make it easier for you to do the work in the present. In other words, you need to capitalize on your experience.

One activity that clearly compounds is learning. Let’s consider a hypothetical scenario to illustrate this.

Imagine that you are a newly hired engineer, and you are asked to fix a bug. At this point, you can follow one of two routes.

The first is the quick and dirty route. You google for a solution, find something on Stack Overflow, slightly hack it to make it work, and are happy that you got through your first bug fix.

The second is the learning route. As this is your first time around, you spend some time learning the core abstractions needed to understand the problem. You make an effort to make sense of the solutions you find, even if there are some gaps in your knowledge. You fix the bug, being mindful of code quality, and learn from your first code review.

The outcome from both routes in the short term is similar: a bug gets fixed. However, they quickly diverge once we factor in the time component.

By repeatedly following the first route, over time, you are not more likely to increase your contributions. Each time, you start and end in the same place. On the other hand, via the second route, you are learning and constantly capitalizing on top of what you know. Every time a new problem comes your way, you’re more likely to solve it better and more quickly, due to the knowledge you’ve accumulated.

Another activity that compounds is self-reflection. Regularly reflecting on your journey allows you to collect valuable lessons and make necessary course corrections. You should often assess whether you're prioritizing effectively, if you're coming up with the best solutions, identifying areas for improvement, and if you're working at a good pace. By doing this, as time goes by, you're more likely to increase the impact of your work, as you start to recognize patterns.

While these are just a couple of examples, many other activities can compound your work. Recently, I started reading the book The effective engineer, by Edmond Lau and have already encountered some others. If you have observed more activities that compound work, feel free to send me an e-mail!

It is almost cliche at this point to say that many things in life compound. As someone at the starting end of their career but who wants to play the long-term game, these two rules make the process (at least appear) manageable. I feel on track if I’m mindful of my pace and constantly improving on my craft, capitalizing on my experience.

¹ If you’d like a good resource on burnout, I encourage you to watch this fantastic video by HealthyGamerGG on it.

² I’m not a fan of the “it’s a marathon, not a sprint” saying. Thinking of it as a marathon implies that you should work at a constant pace. From my experience, I don’t think this is possible, and expecting to do so can be frustrating. There are periods in which the intensity needs to be turned up and others where it needs to be leveled down, depending on internal and external circumstances.