My good friend Charlie Paparelli recently posted to his awesome entrepreneurship blog, Life Imbalance Is Essential to Birth a Company.

My two startups definitely took an outsized effort to birth. When selling my second startup, the night of the closing my wife called at 9:00 PM to tell me that we had to go the hospital to delivery my daughter. I brought my laptop so that I could “press the button” at 7:00 AM to convert the branding on our website as part of a coordinated PR announcement. Luckily it was a false alarm and Margaret was born peacefully nine days later with a fully focused father. She was sweet and understanding even before she was born.

Being on the mentor side of startups right now, I often see entrepreneurs who feel like they are not doing their job if they are not what I call “hostages to the grind”. This blind belief often creates the patently false hope that “if I am grinding it out I must be making progress.” Wrong. You are not starting a company to work hard. You are working hard to get results.

This may seem obvious but many entrepreneurs don’t realize that their toil may be masking incorrect product market fit, bad strategy, poor delegation, or poor team makeup. They think that a startup must be super hard so they don’t question the weight of the effort soon enough. Of all of these, I think understanding and admitting poor product market fit is the hardest for many entrepreneurs. You are always going to grind for sub par results when product market fit is off. When product market fit is right, you are working hard just to hang on.

With rare exceptions, a startup is going to be nearly all consuming. Good leaders need to keep enough brain power and emotional energy in reserve to honestly and continually evaluate the difference between the unavoidable work that is part of the journey and inefficient grinding that should be signaling you to underlying problems in your business.