I've often wondered about this, whether it's possible to still be a big career success and compete against those who are willing to give up their whole personal life for it. I'm not entirely certain I've got an answer, but the solution that comes to me is to make use of certain competitive advantages you have that they don't:
1.) When you're heads-down on a goal, you often miss other things that are going on in the world, like technology shifts or social changes that may affect your business. Someone who makes time for a social life will be much better informed about these, because they have more information coming in from friends and acquaintances.
2.) People who work all their time often get very good at repressing their emotions, because emotionally, it really sucks to work all the time. That blinds them to an important source of information, which makes them make poor global optimizations about their time usage because the rational brain isn't as effective as the emotional brain at processing large amounts of not-directly-comparable information.
3.) People who get used to working all the time often get very impatient and feel they must be doing something productive with every moment. This makes them unsuitable for jobs which require that you sit back and wait.
The biggest example I can think of of people using these against their competitors is Warren Buffett, who's famously built a massive investment firm by being "patient capital", that's willing to wait out the periodic panics and take advantage of them. While the rest of the financial industry runs around like chickens with their heads off, he sits back in Omaha, with a normal middle-class lifestyle, and waits for their emotions to get the best of them and make them do something. And then he swoops in at reduced prices, buys, and waits for the price to come around again.
1.) When you're heads-down on a goal, you often miss other things that are going on in the world, like technology shifts or social changes that may affect your business. Someone who makes time for a social life will be much better informed about these, because they have more information coming in from friends and acquaintances.
2.) People who work all their time often get very good at repressing their emotions, because emotionally, it really sucks to work all the time. That blinds them to an important source of information, which makes them make poor global optimizations about their time usage because the rational brain isn't as effective as the emotional brain at processing large amounts of not-directly-comparable information.
3.) People who get used to working all the time often get very impatient and feel they must be doing something productive with every moment. This makes them unsuitable for jobs which require that you sit back and wait.
The biggest example I can think of of people using these against their competitors is Warren Buffett, who's famously built a massive investment firm by being "patient capital", that's willing to wait out the periodic panics and take advantage of them. While the rest of the financial industry runs around like chickens with their heads off, he sits back in Omaha, with a normal middle-class lifestyle, and waits for their emotions to get the best of them and make them do something. And then he swoops in at reduced prices, buys, and waits for the price to come around again.