You don&#x27;t need wealth and fame to work on what you want. John Carmack started out with neither but he&#x27;s always had one thing to go along with his above average smarts and focus&#x2F;productivity: an unwillingness to compromise on what matters. There were plenty of times in his early career where he challenged management and won (because management realized how valuable he was) but he was fully prepared to take the loss. Better to work as a pizza cook while furiously coding interesting graphics problems and games at night than bow to management&#x27;s demands to patent something like side-scrolling technology on a PC.<p>If you don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s some dimension of his awesomeness that keeps him from getting burned out, what do you think it is? The environment of getting to work on what he wants? Lots of people have that but still burn out, that can&#x27;t be the only thing.<p>Edit: I do agree with your underlying idea though that you don&#x27;t need to be as awesome as Carmack to get the same benefits in terms of being highly productive without burning out. Your output will be scaled down accordingly to how much less awesome you are than he is, but it should be possible, even if <i>very</i> difficult, to transform oneself into a focused, disciplined, productive, and <i>happy</i> worker, even if it&#x27;s very mysterious and individual-specific how to actually do that.