There are certain industries where people are very willing to take a massive hit to their capacity for independent action in exchange for working on their dreams. The NewSpace and Video Game industries are two that pop to mind where,

• Fealty to the vision is explicit as the ability to overwork yourself,
• The ability to work late into the evening.
• The expectation that you are going to get beers with the coworkers after work.
• Coming in on Saturdays (good if your boss asks, but even better if you do it of your own volition).
• It represents itself as crunch time, where you work intensely long hours.

You forego every other aspect of your life. The results are burnout, disenfranchisement, and the ignoring of your relationships.

Dreams and Burnout

For businesses, burnout is a huge problem. There is lots of talk about it, but it is mostly lip service. Solving burnout requires challenging the whole Fiat structure of business, not just a silly HR campaign or a meditation retreat.

At the foundation of burnout is the Fiat structure. You have to work more because I say so. I own more of this company or I am higher up in the ranks and I get to tell you what to do.

The NewSpace industry exploits the fact that it can abuse you because you dream of going to Space. Same for the Video Game industry: these businesses know that you dream to bring the same joy to others that you enjoyed when you were younger.

• It is an honor to work at Google because it represents the cream of the crop of engineering.
• It is an honor to work at SpaceX, not just because of the pedigree, but you also get to work on your childhood dreams.
• It is an honor to work at Blizzard and any other giant of an industry that runs on burning through idealistic engineers.

In each of these companies, people are willing to put in life-debilitating efforts to work there. At the time, they might tell themselves this is the price for working on their dreams. Unfortunately, they will eventually meet the version of themselves that leaves the industry entirely, gets divorced, end us alienated from their children, or/and develops a mental illness.

The Radical model avoids this problem. In a Radical company everyone is working in concert with each other and there are no bosses to tell you to work on the weekend.

Overdoing It

You can still work on the weekend, maybe because that is what you are used to. Your dreams and the joy of their pursuit are your “boss,” prodding you to do it. But you are not the only one paying the price of manic work. Your coworkers pay for it, too.

In a Radical environment, your co-worker has the ability and skill to tell you that she does not like seeing you work to exhaustion for weeks on end. And she doesn’t like you texting her in the evening because it puts pressure on her to overwork and sacrifice her health, her relationship. The ability to talk to your co-workers directly, not through your boss, is one of the Radical foundations.

RADs

It’s not just ideals: Radical brings along practices and tools, too. In a Radical company, she and other co-workers can make this feedback tangible to you. With RADs, they can reward you for things they like or they can stop giving you RADs if you continue on a path that doesn’t work for them. The RAD distribution creates the conditions for different conversations to take place.

In our current, Fiat world, your coworker might say something, but it won’t really be tangible. Only your boss matters.

Pursuing Your Dream

You very well might work at a Radical company where everyone decides they prefer to work on the weekends or at odd hours. Or maybe your team decides to work this way. People can do any of these because everyone is a co-owner.

If during the discussion, somebody brings up that the odd hours may cause burnout, “and that will cost us,” you all, as co-owners, have to consider that, discuss it, and make a decision. If you decide on an odd-hour work schedule, then you’ll have to bring it upfront to potential new co-owners and only people that find that energizing will join. That may be a price you’re willing to pay.

The point is that there are many paths to pursuing your dreams and co-owners can set their own course through explicit conversations. You can choose your path without having to pay the personal cost of not finding a partner, neglecting your dog, or eating your stress.