How to build a sustainable career / lifestyle in PE?

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PE was the move 25 years ago.

I think the key is finding a balance between performance and personal time. Building strong relationships, continuing to learn, and setting healthy boundaries can make a long-term career in PE much more sustainable.

Partners are more reasonable as returns compress. They are focused on fighting the fed. It will get better.

It’s all about leveraging your junior resources. Hone your ability to structure work, train them up by giving detailed feedback (then monopolize the resources that you’ve trained), and nail your own way to efficiently but throughly check their work. 

Lifestyle comes from being a checker versus creator. 

Go down market and move to a city that is slower than major finance hubs. I've connected with many principals and partners in MM and LMM PE firms in cities across the Midwest and South (excluding ATL, Houston, and MIA) that work very reasonable hours, have the weekends to themselves outside of a couple months a year during a live deal sprint, and get paid better on a COL adjustment than those in NYC/LA/SF. 

The way to make the work sustainable is typically around culture of the firm and not the workstreams that you're responsible for. No amount of prestige or future promises of carry is going to make a random Saturday in July palatable to work all day instead of spending it outside with the kids or wife/husband. Find a shop that might be smaller than what you dreamed of but has a culture of actually letting people go and enjoy their lives too. They aren't exceptionally common, but they are more common to find in cities that aren't traditional finance hubs. 

I think the VP jump is where you have to stop treating more hours as the default solution to every problem. As an associate, you can get away with brute-forcing a lot of things yourself. As a VP, if every deal requires you to personally catch every ball, you're going to burn out and become the bottleneck.

The biggest change is learning to delegate without abdicating responsibility, getting ahead of issues before they become emergencies, and being explicit with your team about what actually matters versus what's just noise. You also have to get comfortable with some things being 90% right instead of personally polishing everything to death.

The other thing I'd say is to be deliberate about what you're optimizing for. If you're trying to make MD, there's probably a period where the demands are going to be significant. But not every fire drill is career-defining, and not every weekend sacrificed is buying you anything. Figure out which work genuinely moves the needle and which is just the culture perpetuating itself.

Finally, build a life outside the fund that you actually care about. Not as some generic work-life balance slogan, but because if your entire identity is tied to how well you're doing at work, you'll never feel like you've done enough. PE will happily absorb whatever time you give it.

The irony is that being sustainable probably requires becoming better at the job, not caring less about it.