I have worked at many places. Without exception, the biggest challenge every one of them faced during my time there was either:

1. not enough people wanted what we were selling, or didn’t want it badly enough
2. collectively, we continually did stupid things, or did good/neutral things in stupid ways

That’s it. When we addressed these things, we did better. When we didn’t, we did worse. Heck, even my own company was like this! I continually refused to address the first problem, and as a result, my company was not (and continues to not be, to this day!) very successful.

Thing number one really is an important problem, but to be fair, it’s also hard to solve. You have to know what to make (anyone saying “JUST LISTEN TO THE CUSTOMER” can log off right now and go back to LinkedIn, thank you very much), be able to make it, and be willing to make it. Man, I get tired just writing that and thinking about it. Thing number two — doing stupid things, or doing non-stupid things poorly, or in a stupid way — isn’t as existential or exciting, but it’s usually more solvable, and boy is it absolutely everywhere.

My hilarious, fulfilled, and generally very successful Dad has given me various bits of advice over the years, but none better or more applicable to everyday life than my favorite:

“Don’t be an idiot“.

It’s really an amazing philosophy, and I’ve put a lot of effort into living it every day, even in the face of investors, coworkers, managers, customers, vendors, and countless others almost constantly pressuring me to, in fact, be an idiot in some way. It doesn’t always make me the easiest person in the world to work with, but in the end my dogged insistence on not being an idiot has done wonders for me and many — if not all! — of the companies I’ve worked for.

Despite this, “don’t be an idiot” has not caught on with the business community. Maybe it’s not sexy enough. Maybe it sounds too harsh (although I thought it was cool to be harsh again, I dunno). Maybe, just maybe, high-visibility business ventures increasingly require key stakeholders to act like idiots more than we’d like to admit. But either way, “stop doing important things in stupid ways” just doesn’t seem to be a rallying cry employers are comfortable building their workplace cultures around. Instead…

For whatever reason, we keep coming back to this fantasy that if people work EXTREMELY HARD (not just “hard”, but “so hard that a description of the work makes the Wall Street Journal think people will stop and read about this and feel like something significant is occurring in the world”) the things they do will be extremely, powerfully not-stupid, and thus those things will have value and progress the business forward towards, you know, glory and what-have-you.

Well… let me assure you, as a seasoned professional with 20 (!) years of high-tech (well, mostly high-tech), growth company experience — working super hard and being a counterproductive idiot are not, I repeat, not mutually exclusive. In fact, the whole reason work-life balance even exists in a country where everyone is obsessed with their career and terrified of not being rich in the event they ever encounter even a moderate medical challenge, is because working too hard actually causes you to become an idiot and do stupid, counterproductive things at work. These things range from bad ideas, to yelling at people, to forgetting important things, to major industrial accidents, to being Boeing. All of them are bad, and businesses would almost certainly make more money and deliver improved customer experiences if we did/had less of them.

“Companies are in control again!” Eh, I dunno. I think companies were kind of always in control, since most people work for companies not because it’s fun, but because they are financially dependent on those companies for survival. Really, companies have just gotten tired of trying to create environments where their employees don’t do stupid things, probably because doing so is a vague, difficult and emotionally unsatisfying process.

Sending a picture of yourself pretending to sleep in your office to the Wall Street Journal is pretty stupid — you might even say “idiotic” in the context of building a successful technology product — but it’s not vague, it’s not especially difficult, and to people who feel limited in their ability to actually improve the performance of their businesses, it’s probably somewhat satisfying.

Again, I’ve been working for a long time. And I know that overworking can be a thing really competent, awesome people do that, if managed very carefully, sometimes leads to amazing results that are hard to get in normal working cadences. I totally concede this, and I have allowed myself, my wife, and even some direct reports to occasionally overwork, knowing that I am running the risk of encouraging idiocy in myself or the people I care about. I do understand the tradeoff, I have pulled all-nighters, and I have in fact produced things that came out so good, and so cool, that they made me laugh deliriously at some ungodly hour of the morning. I’m sure I sounded not unlike… an idiot.

BUT, in general, most idiotic things aren’t the wild-eyed second-order effects of genius leaving the body. They are just… stupid, and bad. Things like the worst kind of bloated PowerPoint, hundreds of poorly considered, off-the-cuff Google Doc comments, charts in SaaS apps that don’t make any sense, the entire HubSpot user interface, and other unfortunate outcomes.

Making overworking a requirement, instead of something to manage effectively and with some degree of caution, doesn’t open the floodgates to genius. It opens the floodgates to charlatans and delusional go-getters who are willing to sleep in the office after a long, exhausting day of making bad, impulsive decisions and generally making everything harder for everyone else, including you and your customers. If that’s what you’re going for in 2025, I’m neither all that surprised nor especially interested in hitching my wagon to your future success.