996 Is Not Your Competition

People having fun are

“You can’t compete with someone who is having fun.”

Tiago Forte wrote this five years ago. Still the truest thing on the internet.

Last week at 3 AM, working on our event site. Four hours in, I started laughing. My wife found me grinning at frontend errors. “What’s so funny?”

Everything. The code wasn’t cooperating, but I couldn’t wait to fix it. I loved this idea too much to stop.

This is what the 996 crowd doesn’t understand. They post their suffering like medals. Screenshot their commits. Count their hours. They’re performing intensity to avoid asking if they even care.

Mercenaries do performance theater about 996. Missionaries don’t even look at the clock.

You can’t beat someone who thinks they’re playing.

When you genuinely love the problem, the hours disappear. You’re not counting. You’re playing.

Type 2 fun. Miserable now, magical later. Except when you’re having fun, it’s not even miserable now.

Your 0.1% equity is probably worthless. The expected value is less than staying at Google. Everyone knows this.

So why do it?

Because the math was never the point. The joy is.

I’ve joined four early-stage companies. Left safety each time. Not for equity. For the rush of building something that matters with people who get why it matters.

Fun greases all the wheels when the going gets really tough. And trust me, it will.

Between design sprints, Mario Kart at 2 AM. Controllers among a sea of coffee cups. Someone keeping score of blue shell betrayals. You decompress to compress harder. It’s all part of the same game.

The quiet ones understand this. They’re not posting about their hours because they’re too busy having fun solving problems. Their intensity has joy in it.

Five years later, you won’t remember the easy jobs. You’ll remember shipping at sunrise with people who turned suffering into inside jokes. Building something worth the bruises.

To strive. To learn. For fun. To feel what you’re capable of when you stop performing and start playing.

Most people grinding tonight are spinning. Working brutal hours on problems they don’t love. With people they wouldn’t choose.

Intensity without belief just leads to burnout. You feel it every Sunday night. That weight.

Find your real game. Or waste another year on screenshots nobody remembers.