A viral X post from late last year pitted images depicting two hustle-culture lifestyles side by side: tech bro hoodie and Notes app icon on one side, a business suit and a copy of Cal Newport’s Deep Work on the other side.
“Left guy will most likely beat the right guy,” it concluded. “Guy on the left makes more money but guy on the right is happier,” one user commented.
Whether it’s “grind mode,” “routine maxxing” or some other high-octane “sleep when you’re dead” approach to work, the right specific approach within that umbrella is unclear. It’s the question plaguing young founders and Silicon Valley types.
Maybe some aim to lock in, grind away from 9 to 9 six days per week, fueled by White Monster, a laptop and a dream.
Or perhaps the more effective rise-and-grind technique is to stick to some version of Patrick Bateman’s morning routine from American Psycho. Alarm at 3:55 a.m. Ice bath. Affirmations. Lift some weights. Supplements. Ready to stare at a three-monitor setup for the next eight hours straight, interrupted only by a wearable tracker reminding you to hit your ten thousand steps.
One founder suggested the best combination is actually both.
“There’s gonna be weeks where you have specific deadlines that you just have to grind it out, and you’re not getting good sleep, and you’re not really taking maybe the best health approach to your work routine,” explains Gannon Breslin, CEO of snowballapp.ai, in a recent TikTok post.
He calls this “pure grind mode”. It’s a case of simply getting done what needs to get done, however you can get it done.
This grind mentality is increasingly common among a new generation of Silicon Valley upstarts. In fact, many job listings for AI startups leave no confusion about their expectations from potential applicants.
“Please don’t join if you’re not excited about… working ~70 hrs/week in person with some of the most ambitious people in NYC,” read the description for a role at Rilla, a New York-based tech business.
“Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week,” Elon Musk once said.
The key, according to Breslin, is to balance this out when your business is in “homeostasis”. This is prime time to optimize. “That’s when you’re really caring about your sleep pattern, making sure you have everything dialed in,” he says in the clip.
This is when workers might reestablish a sense of routine – wake up early, focus on their nutrition that’s been neglected while living and breathing the 996 lifestyle, and reduce any inefficiencies (or health problems) that emerged while in “grind mode.”
“And so it’s kind of this, like oscillating pattern between what state your company and business is in,” Breslin concludes.
If this all seems unsustainable, that’s because it is.
Burnout amongst workers is already at an all-time high. A 2025 report from online marketplace Care.com found, while companies believed 45% of their workers were at risk of burnout, in fact 69% of employees said they were actually at moderate to high risk.
Luckily, there’s also a secret third thing. It’s called having a life.