Most Played Moment: Hard Work Doesn't Equal Success…Try This Instead...: Former Netflix CEO

Steven Bartlett (0:00)

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What about hard work? Does it matter?

Marc Randolph (1:05)

Well, since you ask it so simply, I'd say no. Or it certainly is not the most important thing. In fact, I think hard work leading to success is a myth. That, and let me give you two examples, okay?

The first is to qualify what I mean. I work with a lot of, as he spoke earlier before we actually begin the session, about how younger people are different places in their life than older people, especially with career and how they think about it. And earlier in my life, I used to do triathlons, you know, the races that combine swimming and then biking and then running. And back when I used to do them, they don't do it quite the same way anymore. It would be a mass water start. You have four or 500 people who are the gun sounds and all 500 of them plow into the water simultaneously, not a phase start. And as you can imagine, it is a shit show. You mean, you're getting kicked and your goggles are being knocked off and you're being held under water. And you quickly realize that if you want to be able to survive in this mass start, you're going to sprint for those first four, five, 600 yards to get yourself far enough in the front of the pack that you have open water.

And in my opinion, work life is kind of like that. When you're younger, when you don't really know what you're doing, when you have to go down a lot of ends because you're not productive, you better work your ass off. You better sprint. You better work three times harder than everybody else in the company. So it's essential. But ideally you get yourself far enough ahead that you recognize, I can't go at this pace for the entire T of the triathlon. I needed to, to get myself some breathing room, but now I can back off. So yeah, at certain points in your career, you need hard work. At certain points in the trajectory of your business, you need hard work. You're fundraising. You can't say, oh, we're closing the round. I'm taking vacation for two weeks. Oh, we're doing M&A. I'm only going to work a couple hours. No, you're going to have to grind it, but that's not the answer. All right, one more little story, which is part two to this, which is why I say that it's a myth for hard work. So during one part of my career, I lived in Europe. I was doing international marketing for a big software company. We had an office in Paris and I lived in Paris, but I was meeting every week with the marketing people in our other branches. So probably four days out of five, I was flying, flight at Copenhagen one day. Then I'd flight on to Milan. Then I might fly to London. Then I might fly to Madrid in one week. So I spent a lot of time at the airport. And because I'm sometimes not that organized, I'd be late. And you would find me just sprinting down the concourse in my blazer and my wool coat, trying to desperately make the plane. And what I found out was that probably 49% of the time, I'd pull up to the gate and the plane was delayed. And I'd have to wander on to the plane, no problem at all. I could have made it on crutches. And instead, I'd sit there marinating in my sweat for another hour before the plane took off. Or the other 49% of the time, I'd come sprinting down the concourse and you'd see the plane halfway out in the runway about to take off. And what I realized is it didn't make a difference whether you ran for a plane or not. That you're either going to make it or you weren't going to make it, and that running didn't make the difference. And I vowed then and there I'd never run for a plane again, and I never have. And I'm going to tell you that story because it's a metaphor in that so many entrepreneurs spend all this time running for planes. They are up all night polishing their deck. They're reviewing the work of people to make sure the spelling is correct. They're double checking every detail. They are working so hard. But I know from experience that it's like running for the plane. Most of the time, it doesn't make a difference. You don't lose the deal at 2 o'clock that morning because you didn't check the fonts. You lost that deal four weeks ago when you didn't have some fundamentals right. Or you just weren't the right company to begin with. No matter how hard you worked, you weren't going to change the outcome. And that is the key to having some balance in your life as an entrepreneur. Is this recognition that if you're smart about the things that you choose to focus on, you make 99% of the difference. And that all that extra work does not really change the outcome any.