Parent's advice is about favouring team and striving to be an enabler/multiplier rather than sweating over individual perfection of craft. It's a fairly common conclusion that some people arrive at.
What are you contrasting that to? How does that relate to money problems and health problems?
Is becoming a multiplier mutually exclusive from chasing financial success in your opinion?
EDIT to elaborate on the concept of a multiplier. Say you can become a mythical 10x engineer or you can become a mentor. If you can mentor 5 normal engineers from 1x to 2x then you've now got 10x engineering and the org also has reduced bus factor.
What about if those 5 2x engineers can bring another 25 0.5x engineers up to 1x engineers. Suddenly your org can become much more than a single 10x engineer can accomplish.
This is quite spurious and 9 mothers can't have a baby in 1 month but it's a useful mental model for the value of individual contribution vs coaching/managing.
In reality while people like to balk at the idea of the 10x engineer, the truth is there are probably 100x and 1000x engineers out there. Von Neumann is probably a 1000x or more. Linus and Page&Brin are probably at least a 100x etc - those multiples are made up, power laws make numbers go big
I never had the pleasure of working with a manager that cared about me, nor I had contact with any other form of a "multipler" person, other than my parents. So I don't think I'm a good candidate for discussion in this subject, because obviously I won't really know what I'm writing about, and I'm certainly not knowledgable about what you care about.
I only had the impression that the OP tells his subordinates that "they shouldn't oversweat, do some meaningful stuff but remember it won't really matter in the end". This is while working for a company that was created by a person who has probably worked their ass off, and maybe even sacrificed their private life for pursuing a dream of having a large company.
All I'm saying is that money, success, power, connections are so important in life that they give happiness even for other people. If we're poor, then where do we go for help? To those who are richer or more powerful. They enable our happiness in our time of need (that is, if they choose to help us).
Parent's advice is about favouring team and striving to be an enabler/multiplier rather than sweating over individual perfection of craft. It's a fairly common conclusion that some people arrive at.
What are you contrasting that to? How does that relate to money problems and health problems?
Is becoming a multiplier mutually exclusive from chasing financial success in your opinion?
EDIT to elaborate on the concept of a multiplier. Say you can become a mythical 10x engineer or you can become a mentor. If you can mentor 5 normal engineers from 1x to 2x then you've now got 10x engineering and the org also has reduced bus factor.
What about if those 5 2x engineers can bring another 25 0.5x engineers up to 1x engineers. Suddenly your org can become much more than a single 10x engineer can accomplish.
This is quite spurious and 9 mothers can't have a baby in 1 month but it's a useful mental model for the value of individual contribution vs coaching/managing.
In reality while people like to balk at the idea of the 10x engineer, the truth is there are probably 100x and 1000x engineers out there. Von Neumann is probably a 1000x or more. Linus and Page&Brin are probably at least a 100x etc - those multiples are made up, power laws make numbers go big