Trinsic’s ambitions are big. In order to accomplish our goals, we need a tremendous team of people doing the work of their lives. This work will be demanding, so we feel it’s important to set proper expectations about this kind of work and provide guidance about integrating work and life.
Trinsineers are owners. That means we each must be our own decision-maker for how we integrate our work and the rest of our lives. Making those trade-offs is challenging—cognitively, it’s much easier to be told what to do than to be the decision-maker—but we believe being intentional about harmonizing our life’s demands is critical to doing the work of our lives. At a minimum, we hope that by making clear the inputs Trinsic expects from you, you’ll feel empowered to live your best life on and off work.
Most companies today operate according to anachronistic artifacts of the industrial-era. Any employment relationship is a contract; an exchange between two parties. The exchange needed to accomplish Trinsic’s goals is different from the trade-time-for-money exchange that traditional employment practices presume. Building Trinsic using industrial-era employment practices would be like regulating social media using laws meant to govern telegraphs*.
Trinsic does not pay people for their time.
That sentence might seem strange, but it’s critical to internalize. You are not an input of production. "Factors of Production" is an economic theory that says making a product requires inputs: labor + capital*. During the industrial era, it was easy for capitalists to minimize capital investments, leading to poor working conditions and exploitation. Treating human time as a commodity leads to Alienation—where people are disconnected from the product of their work. The concept of a “40 hour workweek” is a direct result of these historical idiosyncrasies and resulting legislation. Thus, the trade-life-for-dollars model of work has been enshrined in our culture.
As an example of the Factors of Production, a table could be produced with either 10% labor and 90% capital (with machines in a factory) or with 90% labor and 10% capital (by someone in their garage using inexpensive hand tools).
If we don’t pay for your time, what does Trinsic pay for? We pay people for their minds. We pay for your ingenuity and impact. Except for the causal/direct relationship it has with ingenuity and impact, the time you spend working at Trinsic is completely irrelevant. In fact, if we could feasibly compensate you purely on impact, we would. Because we hire people for their ingenuity and impact, not for their time, our expectation is not a number of working hours per week, although of course you need to work each week 😊. Rather, we expect that we will each work in a way that maximizes the positive impact we have on the company, in the way we show up, the amount of time we spend, and the things we prioritize.
We expect that we will each act in a way that maximizes the positive impact we have on the company. But what does it mean to “maximize” impact in a typical work day, week, or quarter?
My uncle, a miner, would say that he never knew whether he was 1 foot away from $1 million, or 1 million feet away from $1. As long as you’re acting like an owner, your work will be very much like this. Even after a long day of hard work, you can always dig 1 foot deeper—or 2 feet, or 10 feet. There’s no such thing as “finished” until the entire mountain has been hollowed. In your work, 5 o’clock is irrelevant—there is always more code to write, more people on LinkedIn to hire, customers to acquire, etc. There is no end to the impact you could have.
The question, then, becomes how can you know if you’ve done “enough” to call it a successful day, week, or quarter?
You’ve done enough when you’ve
spent all your creative/professional energy (minus one)
in service of making meaningful progress toward your most important priority
without making unsustainable sacrifices.*
*except in exceptional circumstances
Spending all your creative energy (minus one)
Focus is finite. Decision-making ability is also limited. Anything that involves our pre-frontal cortex is limited each day. You should spend the best parts of your brain—when you’re most inventive, clever, fast, and frankly *smart—*on work each day (ideally as much meaningful, focused deep work as possible). That said, just as athletes don’t push their bodies to the limit every day, you shouldn’t over-extend either. A good rule of thumb is to spend one ‘unit of effort’ less than 100% of your energy on a typical day (this is what we mean by “all minus one”).
Making meaningful progress toward your most important priority
Given you only have a certain amount of mental bandwidth each day, and there is always more to do, prioritization is paramount. This is sometimes called “working smart” as opposed to simply “working hard”. Each day, you should know your most important priority and schedule dedicated time to chip away at it. It’s helpful to set a “highlight” each day or have an accountability partner to help you maximize your impact on the most important work.
Without making unsustainable sacrifices
Generally, unsustainable things are things that make you resent work. Losing sleep, missing life events (like a loved one’s soccer game), or unreasonably impeding your lifestyle*** are things that will make you resent work. Resentment leads to burnout and unhappiness, which isn’t sustainable. That said, it’s also unsustainable to neglect the less-fun parts of your job (email, documentation, meetings, etc).
Exceptional circumstances
There may be times when we need to push exceptionally hard and do unsustainable things to achieve a challenging goal. Like the college student whose social life disappears during finals week, you should expect there will be occasions when work will be very demanding—even unsustainable. This is a marathon where we sprint so you should expect these circumstances be the exception, not the rule.