I worked 14-hour days at a startup. A cancer diagnosis changed how I succeeded at Netflix and Meta.

"I was told when I joined that it would be really important that you're seen around here a lot. So I would work until 7, 8, 9 - sometimes until 10 p.m. Then we started hitting delivery schedules, and I was getting to work around 10 in the morning and going home sometimes at 2:30 in the morning. We're talking 14-hours days, six to seven days a week. Eighty hours a week would've been a break."

"On Friday night, January 17, my wife took me to the emergency room. The doctor told me, "This is likely colon cancer." After the first surgery, he said, "There's no way you have a tumor like this and it's not cancer." Two weeks earlier, I had been running and feeling great. Within a week, I was in a hospital bed on machines."

He worked at a video playback company from 2000 and spent seven years learning practical video systems. He loved working on video and compares those years to earning a practical Ph.D. The workplace demanded constant visibility, prompting long evenings and later extreme schedules that reached 14-hour days, six to seven days a week. Leadership repeatedly shifted priorities, causing months of work to be redirected. He equates the overtime to compensating for poor decisions. In January 2004 he suddenly fell ill, went to the emergency room on January 17, and doctors diagnosed likely colon cancer. Surgery followed and a week-long wait before full surgery felt very dark. He recalled his mother's death from breast cancer at 48.

Read at Business Insider