Maybe Attaining Work-Life Balance Isn’t the Best Goal for You
At one point several years into my General Counsel role for an S&P 500 public company, I wrote three letters up on my whiteboard. They were to serve as my guideposts for the rest of my career.
My boss came in one day and asked “What’re those?”
I told him they stood for Family, Health, and Work. I said that they represented my priorities in life, in that order.
He pondered my whiteboard and my statement for a few moments and said, “Those are nice goals … for your next job.”
Message clear. What got you here is what will keep you here. If you want an easy life, go get an easy job.
That is, you generally don’t see them together.
Nothing in my path to getting a C-suite job by my 30s was remotely the result of balance.
Family: haha! I was single until my last year of law school. When I started working, I kept a picture of my wife nearby to remember what she looked like.
Social life: You must be joking. In my law firm days, the only times I wasn’t working I was desperate for sleep.
Exercise: Yeah, right. I suppose carting boxes of prospectuses from the printer counted for something.
Okay, so I worked a lot more than was healthy. But I credit my rise in no small part to letting my life get well and truly out of balance in pursuit of high performance.
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