I think there was like literally one week where I actually worked 120 hours and just didnt leave the factory.... — Elon Musk

I think there was like literally one week where I actually worked 120 hours and just didnt leave the factory. I didnt even go outside

Author: Elon Musk

Insight: There's something almost incomprehensible about 120 hours of work in a single week—it breaks your brain to imagine it. But what's more interesting than the extreme number itself is what it reveals: the moment when ambition stops being aspirational and becomes almost delusional. At some point, you're not being productive anymore; you're just proving something to yourself, or maybe to an invisible audience. This kind of grinding shows up everywhere now, not just in factories or startups. It's the email at midnight, the "just one more thing" that becomes five more things, the blurring of boundaries until you forget what normal even looks like. The seductive part is that it feels like dedication, like you're the kind of person who doesn't quit. But there's a hidden cost nobody talks about: when you work like that, you're often making worse decisions, not better ones. Your judgment gets foggy. You miss obvious problems. You burn out people around you who feel pressure to match your hours. The real insight isn't that pushing hard can get results—it's that there's usually a better way to get the same result, and you can't see it when you're too deep in the grind to think clearly.

Source: Interview on Recode Decode with Kara Swisher, 2018