You can't outwork this

At Goldman Sachs, if you left before midnight, you were a loser.

You didn’t get a memo about it, and there was no official policy. There was just a shared understanding that if you went home early, it somehow meant you didn’t care. Or you couldn’t hack it.

When things slowed down during the day (which was rare, but apparently unacceptable) we’d strip down to our undershirts and do push-up competitions in the conference room.

I can still picture it now: Grown men with Ivy League degrees, financial models still open on the screens behind us.

And honestly, I thrived in that environment. It was clean, brutal, and efficient. You didn’t have to wonder if you were doing enough. Exhaustion answered that question for you. And nothing says “future leader of the global economy” like trying to squeeze out one more rep while your VP counts out loud.

At the time, this felt normal. Motivating, even. Like we were sharpening ourselves. Like, discomfort was proof we were doing it right.

I remember being proud of it.

I’m still proud of it, which also makes me laugh.

The Cold Water

A few years later, my wife and I went to visit one of my best friends from Goldman.

He still wakes up at 4:30 every morning, takes a cold shower, and drinks matcha with no sugar. Followed by a lonely, punishing solo workout before the sun comes up. He’s been doing some version of this for twenty years. And he’s never, he claims, taken a day off.

We wake up. My wife takes a shower.

She comes out and says, “What the hell... he can’t even have hot water???”

They had turned it off.

Not “he prefers cold showers.” They removed the option.

As if hot water makes you weak. As if comfort is a gateway drug. And to eliminate temptation altogether, they just shut the valve.

My wife was horrified.

I immediately thought, yeah... that tracks.

Because my friend will tell you (half joking, half not) that all of this comes from the same place: a deep, unresolved question of “Am I good enough?”

We know each other well enough that we’re both in on the joke.

But what’s funny is, years later, some of the most successful people I know would look at this and laugh—not in a mocking way, but the way you laugh at something you once believed very deeply.

The Leak

That mindset doesn’t stay in the bathroom.

When I later started running a business, I didn’t rethink any of this. I reused it.

If something broke, I fixed it. If someone needed help, I stepped in. If a decision felt risky, I absorbed it. At the end of the day, I could look at everything I personally handled and feel justified in being exhausted.

That exhaustion meant I was doing my job.

For a while, it worked.

Until it started leaking. And by leaking, I mean leaking alcohol.

I didn’t have some dramatic realization. I just started drinking at night because it was the only way my head would shut off. The only way I could sit still without feeling like I should be doing something. Which felt responsible at the time.

Working harder wasn’t relieving the pressure. It was tightening it.

Then I woke up one morning with a broken molar from grinding my teeth in my sleep.

Around the same time, I noticed another pattern. I kept hiring people I was convinced were great. Six months later, they were either gone or I was letting them go. I told myself I just hadn’t found the right people yet.

Which is comforting.

But it was also wrong.

If effort was the answer, this should have been getting easier. It wasn’t. It was getting harder—and deadlier.

Dan and (the) Bill

There’s an originator I know. Let’s call him Dan.

Dan was well respected with a strong referral base, doing about $110M a year. Like the originators above, his phone never stopped ringing. People pointed to him as proof of what was possible.

If you’d asked any of us back then whether Dan was doing too much, we would’ve said no. We would’ve said he was just built differently.

What most people didn’t see was that Dan was an alcoholic. He was also using hard drugs. His marriage was barely holding together. He was close to losing his family.

None of that showed up in the numbers.

Being busy covered it. Being successful covered it. Being needed covered it.

After Dan got sober, we talked. Not because he wanted to grow faster. Or because he wanted tactics. But because he wanted to understand why everything still felt so tight even though, on paper, he was winning.

The answer wasn’t complicated. Everything waited on him. Decisions stacked up until he weighed in. The business worked—but only if Dan stayed tense.

I see this same thing play out with originators all the time.

From the outside, they look unstoppable. Their volume is climbing, and their phones are ringing off the hook. Everyone knows their name. They’re always available. Always responsive. Always “on.” People talk about their work ethic like it’s a compliment.

And then the bill shows up.

Sleep goes first. Then patience. Then relationships. Then the body starts keeping score. Weight creeps up. Meals get faster and worse. They tell themselves they’ll get back to it once things slow down. They don’t. And it never slows down.

Then the coping mechanisms show up. Sometimes it’s alcohol. Sometimes it’s porn or control. Sometimes it’s anger dressed up as standards. Sometimes it’s hiring and firing the same role over and over and calling it bad luck.

They’ll tell you it’s just the season, or the interest rates, or the algorithm, or AI.

But the funny thing about excuses is that the longer they last, the more permanent they start to feel.

The Amsterdam Problem

I was on a call recently with a loan officer. He’d just come back from Amsterdam. Miserable the whole time, he told me. Couldn’t enjoy a minute of it.

Why?

Because he hadn’t told his realtors he was going.

He was scared they’d think he was lazy. That he didn’t care about them. So instead of being honest, he just... stayed available. Took calls at 3am local time. Answered texts between bites of stroopwafel. And of course, because he hadn’t set expectations, the messages piled up while he slept. Every morning he woke up to angry referral partners wondering why he’d gone dark.

The irony was thick enough to spread on toast.

I asked him what would have happened if he’d just called his realtors before the trip. Told them he was going away for a week, that his responsiveness would be slower, and that if they had an emergency, here’s who to contact.

He paused. Then: “They probably would have said, ‘Have a great time, Greg. I’d love to do something like that.’”

And then maybe—just maybe—they would have started a conversation about why they’re all so addicted to being on call every waking moment.

It seems to me that Greg’s problem wasn’t Amsterdam. It was the story he’d told himself about what his realtors needed from him. A story that wasn’t even true.

Ignacio

Three years ago, I hired a new sales leader named Ignacio.

It was a culture shock for him.

At the time, we were addicted to urgency. Everything was urgent. Every problem needed to be solved immediately. All hands. Right now. If something felt uncomfortable, we treated that discomfort like a fire alarm.

Ignacio didn’t.

An originator would come to him spun up, emotional, convinced something had to be fixed immediately. More often than not, he’d say, “Let’s talk about it next week.”

He’d say it calmly. Sometimes smiling. Like he had nowhere else to be.

I’m not going to lie: this drove me insane.

I hate unresolved problems. I want them fixed. Now. The idea of letting something sit felt irresponsibly lazy.

But then I began to notice something strange.

During the gap between the problem and the end of the week, the problem didn’t get worse. It got clearer. Not only that, but conversations got calmer, and the decisions that got made stuck longer. And slowly—almost against my will—the anxiety level of the entire organization came down.

You’d think I’d appreciate that. But I didn’t. It bothered me.

Because it meant a lot of what I had been calling leadership was really just intolerance for unresolved tension.

The Itch

This is the part of the story where I tell you I’ve evolved past all of this.

But that wouldn’t be true.

When things are quiet. When nobody needs me. When the business is actually working the way it’s supposed to, I still feel that familiar itch. And while I don’t do push-up competitions in conference rooms anymore, I still do them in my office. Sometimes with other people.

Effort has been my default for a long time.

The difference now is I recognize the feeling.

Because when I look at a high-producing originator who’s exhausted, constantly “putting out fires,” and quietly proud of how much everyone depends on them, I don’t think that person needs better skills.

I think, oh... I know that feeling.

They’ll tell you they love the grind. They’ll tell you this is just the season they’re in. They’ll tell you they wouldn’t have it any other way.

I used to say the same things—usually while grinding my teeth in my sleep and convincing myself that drinking at night was just how things were.

That’s the funny part.

It doesn’t feel like suffering when you’re inside it. It feels like competence.

The Lighter Ones

What changed for me wasn’t discipline or willpower. It was proximity.

I started spending time with very successful people who weren’t always working—and therefore weren’t constantly stressed. Who laughed easily, took vacations, and didn’t confuse urgency with importance.

And that’s when I noticed it.

These people were operating at a totally different level from me. Not because they worked harder. Because they’d figured out something I hadn’t.

It’s actually within your power to have a life.

You can tell your realtors you’re going on vacation. You can let a problem sit until next week. You can stop being the bottleneck that everything flows through—and the business won’t collapse. It might even get better.

Every year, originators set the same goals: I’m not going to work twenty-hour days, I’m not going to take calls all weekend, I’m not going to run myself into the ground. And every year, they break those promises to themselves.

But the successful people I started spending time with? They’d stopped making those promises. Not because they’d given up on balance—but because they’d actually achieved it. They’d built businesses and teams and systems that didn’t require them to be tense all the time.

They weren’t less driven.

They were just lighter.

They still cared.

They just didn’t need to prove it every single day.

I eventually noticed that when things were running smoothly, my instinct wasn’t to enjoy it.

It was to make it harder.

And once you see that, it’s hard not to notice how many people are still playing the same game, just very, very well.

—Rich Weidel
CEO, Princeton Mortgage

Want to work with Princeton or learnb more? Click here