A few days ago, the New York Times ran a piece about how two bloggers had died, and how another two were having health problems. They put this down to the non-stop stress of trying to build up a blog network, working 24-hours, and the associated lack of sleep and unhealthy lifestyle. I'd flicked through it at the time, noting with sadness that people had died trying to build their businesses, and hoping that Michael Arrington over at Techcrunch manages to sort himself out and get a proper work/life balance.
Yesterday Jason Calacanis wrote a post discussing the New York Times story - and pointing out that the fact that they were all building a blog network wasn't the trend, it was that they were all entrepreneurs, trying to build their own businesses and dealing with the stress of that. It's a great post by an experienced entrepreneur on how to build a business whilst maintaining your work/life balance and look after your stress levels, and really hit home for me - a couple of years ago I thought that the only way to be a successful businessman was to power work and never rest. I was working til 1am and getting up at 5am every day. After 6 months of this I came down with a bad case of appendicitis - bit of a blow to go from working non-stop all hours of the day to suddenly being bed-ridden, hospitalised and then recovering from surgery.
Since then I've kept more of a balanced load - I'm still working pretty much non-stop, but always ensure I take a bit of time for myself each day, get out early to train/go for a run in the morning, and get a reasonable nights sleep. If you're a fairly new or first time entrepreneur then this is something you need to start thinking about now -it's easy to think we're invincible, but unfortunately it's not true; it's not maintainable, and in the long run it's not good for the business, or you.
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