There is a version of entrepreneurship that looks like this: available around the clock, productively maxing every minute, treating busyness as a personality trait and wearing a few hours of sleep as a badge of honour.
The story goes, if you are not running on your absolute red-eyed caffeine-driven version of yourself, you are not serious enough.
And yes, there is something real in that.
Urgency and high agency matter, and devotion to your work is pretty much the prerequisite for getting something new off the ground. After all, creating anything new requires momentum and that requires more energy than maintaining the status quo, but whether that has to be a continuous state and the permanent price of building a business though, I honestly do not want to think so.
Because somewhere along the way the hustle narrative forgot to mention something important: building anything new, regardless of size, has a real physiological cost.
It will affect your nervous system, your sleep, your relationships, and your ability to think clearly. Not because you are weak or not serious enough but because that is just how the human system works under sustained novel stress.
Even your Oura ring will come for you eventually whether you listen or not. And that is actually what got me thinking about this more seriously.
Not because I am building the next tech ai unicorn or because I feel any particularly high external pressure, but because I stopped and looked at my Oura data from the recent weeks and noticed a pattern of not recovering enough.
For the context, I have been co-running a digital presence agency, doing risk consulting, learning German, and working to open a healthy takeaway drinks concept in the centre of Zürich. My days are all about solving new problems, making decisions in a language that is not my first or second, and planning for the biggest project I have pulled off so far. It is genuinely exciting, but it is also genuinely demanding in ways I did not fully anticipate.
And from all of that, what I have learned though is that working and making decisions when tired, late at night, in stress mode does not produce better outcomes. Rather, it produces worse ones.
The thinking is slower, the judgment is off, and the catastrophising that kicks in after a certain hour is not a reflection of reality. It is just a depleted nervous system trying to process too much at once.
So rest cannot be a reward for when the work is done, but it must be part of the design and planning how the work gets done well.
I would even dare to say that the most underrated thing you can build into a business from the beginning is the operational design around your own energy.
Knowing what hours your thinking is actually sharp, and knowing when to stop making decisions for the day. On top of that, or as foundation, eating regularly, sleeping intentionally, reducing sensory overload, moving, not going straight into execution mode the moment you open your eyes. Having somewhat predictable daily routines and habits that the rest of the work can be built around.
These are must haves, which also keep me coming back to the analogy of athletes. They understand the importance of rest and recovery and build the personal infrastructure to support it, but why do people in business not apply the same logic?
These are not soft requirements. Rather, compromising on them today is like taking a loan from your future self with no plan to pay it back.
In the end, a business that does not slowly ruin your health and gives you actual freedom is not a lesser business. Instead, it might actually be the harder and more sophisticated thing to build, and the one that will bring you the ROI that actually matters.