The Grind Has a Ceiling
“Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop.”
I am writing this from vacation.
Not the kind I usually take, where I am technically away but still refreshing my inbox at breakfast and answering the one thing that cannot wait, which somehow turns out to be most things. This time I did something I have not done in years. I set my email to hold what comes in until I am back. A week and a half of messages, waiting. And the world did not end.
It has been awesome. It has also reminded me of something I have known for a long time from health and sports psychology and have been quietly ignoring in my own life while building this company.
The Case for the Grind
Startups are hard in a way that is easy to romanticize and hard to actually live. For the kind of scalable, innovative company we are building, the number people reach for is that roughly nine in ten eventually fail. I want to be honest that this one is more estimate than hard statistic. It traces back to the Startup Genome Report, which never published a clear definition of failure or a fully transparent method, so I hold it loosely. The firmer figure, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is that about half of all new businesses are gone within five years. Even held loosely, the direction is the same.
Most companies like ours do not make it, and the reasons are rarely dramatic. A lack of market need sits at the top, with simply running out of cash close behind. You are always chasing runway, which is just a gentler word for the amount of time you have before the money runs out. When time is the scarcest resource, you feel it differently than you do in other jobs. Clocking out at five when there is still road to cover does not feel like a healthy boundary. It feels like hours you will not get back.
So yes, I believe in the grind. You do not build an early-stage company on a cushy schedule. The early years are the years you put in the disproportionate effort, because that is what it takes to build the foundation, the structures, the systems, and eventually the people who let the business run on something sturdier than your own willpower. That is the entire point of the grind. It is temporary by design. You push hard at the start so that later the company does not depend on you pushing hard forever. This is part of why a startup is not for everyone, and that is not a judgment. It is just true.
The Ceiling Nobody Warns You About
Here is what the grind narrative leaves out. Willpower and commitment are real, and they are also finite. In sports psychology this is not a motivational idea, it is a measured one. Performance depends on the balance between stress and recovery, and when recovery stays low for long enough, performance drops no matter how committed the athlete is. Michael Kellmann's work with elite athletes makes the point plainly (Kellmann, 2002; Kellmann et al., 2018). Underrecovery, sustained over time, produces underperformance in athletes and non-athletes alike. The body and the mind do not care how important your mission is. They keep the same books either way.
There is a specific mechanism here that founders should know by name. Sonnentag and Fritz call it psychological detachment, the ability to mentally step away from work during off time, not just physically leave the building (Sonnentag & Fritz, 2007). Detachment turns out to be one of the strongest predictors of whether time off actually restores you. It is also exactly the thing founders are worst at. I can take a week off and detach zero percent, and I will come back as tired as I left. That was most of my past time off. Present in body, still on call in my head. Filing the emails this week was the first time in a long time I actually crossed that line, and the difference is not subtle.
The Two Ways This Ends
So there are two poles, and both of them kill companies. On one end, you refuse to grind, you protect comfort, and the company runs out of runway before it ever finds its footing. On the other end, you grind without limit, you burn yourself and your people down to nothing, and the company loses the very humans it was built on. Neither pole is a strategy. The work is to hold the tension between them, which is harder than picking a side, because holding tension never fully resolves. You are always calibrating.
To Be Sure
None of this is a case for going soft. The stakes are real and the runway is real, and a founder who uses recovery as a reason to coast is telling on themselves. Recovery is not the opposite of intensity. It is what makes intensity repeatable. The athletes who train the hardest are almost always the ones who recover most deliberately, because they treat recovery as part of the training rather than time stolen from it. The goal is not less commitment. It is commitment that can last long enough to matter.
The Groops Take
We are coming up on four years of the Groops model as it exists today, and I have opinions about sustainable performance that I hold for every team we work with and have been slow to apply to myself. This is the founder's version of a pattern we see inside companies constantly. Leaders set a pace under pressure, and the whole team absorbs it, including the parts nobody says out loud. If the person at the top never detaches, the team quietly learns that detaching is not safe here, and you end up with a group of people who are present but slowly depleting. Cohesion and performance do not survive that for long. The teams that sustain high performance are not the ones who never stop. They are the ones who know how to. Building that into a culture on purpose is a lot of what we do.
Something to Try: Take One Real Interval
Not a vacation. Just one genuine interval of detachment, sized to what is actually realistic this week.
Pick a window. An evening, a weekend morning, a single afternoon. Then set it up so work genuinely cannot reach you. Not muted. Actually held. Turn on the away message. Close the tab. Tell the one person who needs to know.
Then notice what happens in your own head. The first stretch may feel like withdrawal, the itch to check, the certainty that something is on fire. Sit through it. Detachment is a skill, and like any skill it feels awkward before it feels natural. What you are training is the capacity to come back sharper than you left, which is the only kind of stamina that lasts.
Ready to Build a Team That Can Sustain the Pace?
If you want to understand where your team's performance is being quietly drained, by pace, by depletion, or by a culture that never learned to recover, we would love to talk. You can reach us below.
References
CB Insights. (2024). The top reasons startups fail.
Kellmann, M. (Ed.). (2002). Enhancing recovery: Preventing underperformance in athletes. Human Kinetics.
Kellmann, M., Bertollo, M., Bosquet, L., Brink, M., Coutts, A. J., Duffield, R., … Beckmann, J. (2018). Recovery and performance in sport: Consensus statement. International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, 13(2), 240–245.
Sonnentag, S., & Fritz, C. (2007). The recovery experience questionnaire: Development and validation of a measure for assessing recuperation and unwinding from work. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 12(3), 204–221.
Startup Genome. (2011). Startup genome report: A new framework for understanding why startups succeed.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2024). Business employment dynamics: Establishment age and survival data.