Do we really need the toxic hustle culture in 2026, in the age of AI, to succeed?

So here I am, freshly out of yet another project, and it is becoming a little bit of a pattern.

We talk about a lot of ambitions, we talk about beautiful goals, we talk about execution. And this time we even said out loud that we are not necessarily chasing a unicorn. We wanna have fun building, and we just want to be enjoying the company of each other and the benefits of the age of AI. And yet the thank you posts and the little lore around the project that I just left is about working 16 hours, hustling, running rounds.

It feels weird.

My workflow is by far not smooth and ideal, but I talked about it the other day in a different piece where I was claiming that I'm not able to measure ROI of artificial intelligence in my own flows really well, but I am able to perceive the level of presence with my daughter and the time I am now able to spend with her outside of work while my numbers are still getting crunched and my code is being written.

I don't want to make this necessarily a long post, so...

Here's a formula.

First, let's set up a long-term strategy. Let's do three years, because this might be an eternity nowadays, and then split it into yearly brackets.

For the matter, let's just take the first year as immediate step and plan out goals for the year.

Then, have strategic sessions every year and break it down into quarterly goals and quarterly milestones. Make 5 per quarter a strategic bet, other projects are adjacent experiments. At the end of the quarter, these experiments get killed or promoted to one of five strategic bets.

Then, spend time (in my current stage it's 41 minutes every week on a Monday morning) planning the week based on goals and your strategic bets every week.

And then... let AI execute the above while you're steering. Side note on the steering: nowadays it's just existing because some of the global providers are changing around business models, usage patterns, and usage quota every day to make life a little bit challenging. In an ideal world, you'd steer any decision once and then your AI would just keep a memory and do it on its own.

It's no longer AI making bad guesses on what needs to happen.

Is it cognitively challenging? (Hell) Yes.

You basically have to babysit a model (or models) to get to the outcomes that you could eventually do on your own, for sure not in that quality and for sure not in that time. It's not a job for 16 hours. I don't really think that 16 hours is time well spent anymore.

I know, and I was guilty of it myself: history rewarded people being busy. If you were busy, it kinda meant you are important.

It is my belief, and now hold on your hat, if you have to spend 16-hour days making steps to success in the age of 2026 AI, you are an idiot. My good guess is, you're prompting an "agent", consider yourself "productive". You also quite possible have no metrics to watch for, no sense of what ROI your work brings, and also very possibly no respect for your own life. You're throwing stuff on the wall and see what sticks. You're not forcing statistics on your side, you're just doing more of the same mistakes in a shorter period of time.

Sure, maybe it's still the definition of success for you.

Maybe your success is not being present for your daughter and for your family, and that's perfectly okay. You do you.

Still, even through that, you wanna have a little bit of energy to celebrate your wins after all.

Running 16-hour hustles isn't probably gonna get you there.

I can tell you from my own experience.