Working 60h/week is fine as long as you are the founder. You're working for yourself (as well as the athlete and the musician of your example). The "problem" is working 60h/week for someone else (even if you have equity).
Founders have less work/life balance than regular workers, in US, in Sweden and everywhere else.
That’s the calculus that you’ve made for your situation (and it seems quite reasonable and internally consistent) and recommending others consider that for their situation.
For me: I’ve had many happy times in my life. Many of them where when I was working 60+ hours per week on a project that I didn’t own (sometimes literally owned none of it, other times 0.<many 0s>1 of it).
If you pay me well enough (exact definition subject to negotiation), keep the bullshit to a minimum, and put interesting problems onto the field of play, I’ll happily work 60 hours a week doing puzzles that you’re basically overpaying me to solve because I find them fascinating and would do them for free if the world didn’t run on money.
Yes, but as OP said, this is a problem. You're doing it for no benefit to yourself and if you have a family, to the detriment of your family. If you don't have a family and don't want one, no one is getting hurt and I wouldn't judge you for doing it (I myself spend way too long coding side projects but my wife kind of likes it as she also spends huge amounts of time on her equivalent activities), but life is short and we only get one shot at it... as long as we're consciously choosing what is best to spend our time on and remembering those around us and not causing harm to them or ourselves, all is good.
What’s the benefit to myself to watching a ballgame, going to the orchestra, putting together a jigsaw puzzle, watching a reality TV show, or any of the other 1000s of things I could choose to do to entertain myself?
>Founders have less work/life balance than regular workers,
If you're applying the "work/life balance" to founders that are doing what they prefer to do, it means my previous comment didn't do a good job explaining the flaw with that distorted lens.
Imagine a retired person spending all day in her garden... planting flowers, trimming hedges into pleasing shapes, etc. When not outside in her garden, she's still reading about gardening in magazines and surfing website discussion forums related to gardening. When doing neither of those tasks, she still thinks about gardening while laying in bed and anticipates the tasks she wants to do the following day and the future plans for the next week/month/year. The sum of all of her gardening effort adds up to more than 40+ hours per week. However, most outsiders would not say the retired gardener is having a "work/life balance" problem or that she's a "workaholic". Instead, we give her a charitable label such as, "she's enjoying life".
For many startup founders, building the business is the "garden" or "creative canvas" to express themselves.
For others where the activities at the job are not the most fulfilling form of living, we then have to construct this mathematical ratio of "work:life" because the work is undesirable and it's the life that is desirable. (E.g. sayings such as "work to live instead of live to work" or "working for the weekend".) Therefore, "work-vs-life balance" is indirect code speak for "undesirable-vs-desirable balance".
The founders that are doing what they truly want to do (even if it's 60+ hours a week) don't have this giant misalignment of desirable-vs-undesirable activity and therefore, the whole "work/life balance" is meaningless to them. Their work _is_ the passionate life. You can't apply "work-life balance" to Warren Buffett. He's been fascinated by business financial numbers since he was a little boy. Thus, forcing Warren Buffett go on a whale watching expedition to fulfill our expectations of "life" in the work/life balance equation is actually cruel torture to him.
Founders have less work/life balance than regular workers, in US, in Sweden and everywhere else.