Competition can call for great sacrifice of personal time and private life. For example, she may not have had vacations cancelled, missed weddings/funerals/birthdays/kids' games and recitals... or been required to stay at the office and work 48-hours straight through to resolve a disaster-recovery issue.
Well, I never ran into any of those issues you mentioned, at any of the four startups that I worked in. Once I was forced to miss a class I was taking to help with a sales call, and my boss took the salesperson to task for it. It never happened again.
Over time, some individuals may find a measure of challenge, reward, and exhilaration from pursuits in their free time outside of work, such as start-ups, vacations, travel, friends, family, and volunteer causes (paying it forward and/or giving back). There may be something to be said for balance in one's life.
You make it sound like it is one or the other. Just like people have different levels of intelligence, people also have different levels of energy. In my younger days, I could easily do 60 hours a week of productive work and still have plenty of energy and time left for outside activities. But more than that and my productivity and happiness went down rapidly. The good managers I had understood this. When I had bad ones, I stopped working for them.
