Working 24 hours a day isn't enough anymore. You have to be willing to sacrifice everything to be successful, including your personal life, your family life, maybe more. If people think it's any less, they're wrong, and they will fail.

Sacrifice Everything or Stay Sharp

There's something seductive about this kind of talk. It lets you off the hook—if success requires destroying everything else, then failure isn't really your fault; you just didn't sacrifice enough. But this framing gets the relationship between work and results backwards. The people who actually build lasting things rarely do it by burning out their support systems. They do it by being ruthless about focus, not by being reckless about everything.

The real tension is that some seasons of building do demand intensity. A startup's first year is different from its fifth. Learning a craft requires deliberate practice. But there's a difference between temporary, focused intensity and the all-consuming sacrifice being described here. The latter tends to produce either burnout or people so disconnected from reality that they make terrible decisions. Your partner, your friendships, your health—these aren't obstacles to success. They're often what keep you sane enough to actually succeed.

What O'Leary might be accidentally pointing at is that you can't have it all at once. You have to choose what matters most in different seasons. But "willing to sacrifice everything" isn't the same as "willing to make hard choices about priority." One leaves you hollow; the other leaves you sharp.