Work vs Life

The strawberries taste like strawberries. The snozberries taste like snozberries. Snozzberries? What the heck of a snozzberry? We are the music makers, and we are the dream of setting laws.

This is the Music Makers podcast where I read things out loud to you and then offer my unqualified opinions on them. Work versus Life, Greatness versus Family by Ben Peurath. A few weeks ago, I got an email from someone asking if I'd written anything on the topics of start ups and family. We want to have a thriving family life and a thriving creative life, but it seems like most really cool jobs in the tech start up world are almost comprehensive lifestyle and time eaters. The more young single guys at an office, the more the plan of dinner as a family seems foreign and inconvenient.

Right around the same time, I saw this post by Bijan in which he asks, what if Steve Jobs was happy and balanced? Could he have turned around Apple? What would have become of Pixar? Could he have it all? I was a workaholic until I had my first son 5 years ago, in the sense that I worked as often and hard as I could.

My identity was tied in with my work, so I felt empty if I wasn't pushing excellence. I've gradually been shedding assumptions about work habits ever since. It's shameful for me to think that it took parenthood to boot me out of it, and I feel like an asshole for the time I lost with my wife before then. To set the foundation of the thinking that I've grown into, I'll share a quote with you that I find myself coming back to often. I must study politics and war that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.

Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, and naval architecture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain. John Adams, in a letter to his wife, 17/80. Which, in my head, I usually shorten to, I go to war that my son may be a politician, that his son may be a merchant, that his son may be an artist. With that said, yes. I have faith that it's possible to accomplish great things and also be a great family man.

I've run this by a few people and the inevitable response comes back, So you're seriously saying you can do something other great men haven't? The hubris is difficult to stomach. But while it's a temptation to put myself in the shadow of others' greatness, as doing so removes the pressure of having to ask the question at all, Whether or not Rockefeller or Curie or Jobs or Carnegie or Welles or Earhart or Buffet or King Junior or Aurelius or any other historically great person could have been great while also being dedicated and present for their family is ultimately irrelevant to the question. The question isn't whether they could. The question is whether I can.

In which case, the answer becomes yes. Absolutely yes. Because I have the Internet. Because I have HipChat and IChat and an iPhone. Because I have email and Adobe and broadband and computers and information theory and the electrical grid and grocery stores and education and western privilege and an audience of 1,000,000,000.

How many generations worth of effort did it take to get me in this garage sitting at this laptop doing meaningful work just a few doors down from where my kids are sleeping? The John Adams quote reminds me of the sacrifice and effort that went into getting me here, where I am today, not just in a generic sense, but as an acknowledgment that I'm a member of a society where the arts, which include design and development, are at the pinnacle of where things are headed. As artists, we are at the bleeding edge of a technological bell curve which is slowly spanning the entire population. We've been placed at the peak of a pyramid 10000 years tall, and we act like we can't call a truce with our inboxes for long enough to go spend meaningful time with our kids. Go home early.

Stay out late. Read a book. Watch a movie. Do whatever you need to do to fill your brain with the goods it needs to churn out the work you're hired for. We're all eating a fat slice of Sagan's apple pie to the point where it's impossible to see down to the first set of shoulders we're standing on.

The amount of efficiency and opportunity baked into my life makes anything less than the pursuit of greatness in both my work and my personal life an insult to the people who got me here. Anecdotally, when I was running supply, I showed up at the office around 8 and worked till just before 5 PM, at which point I got on the train for an hour plus commute to Westchester. Nowadays, I work from 9 AM to 5:30 PM at a card table in my garage. I'll have occasional spurts of discipline where I wake up earlier in the morning before the kids wake up, but generally, I'm working about a 45 hour work week. As a brain worker who spends as much time struggling with how to approach my work as I do actually pushing pixels, I find that when I give myself more hours, the only thing that scales up is procrastination.

There's little difference in my productivity in an 80 hour or 40 hour work week. One more aspect of this that I'll mention is that as a manager or CEO, especially of a start up, there are only so many things you can do to control the success of your company. Market acceptance, competition's activity, and the ebb and flow of trends are inherently beyond their grasp. Employee work hours, however, are the one thing a manager can control. So they do.

If a boss is feeling insecure about how their company is performing, then leaning on their employees for a few more hours is one of the ways that they can feel like they're turning the cogs towards success. Fight the good fight and don't let pressure steer you clear of your values. If someone fires you because you've prioritized health and love in your life, then embrace the opportunity to start your own company or find a new one that isn't going to degrade you. Don't buy into an assembly line mentality when it's clearly opposed to everything we work towards as a society. Treat yourself like an artist.

John Adams would have wanted it that way. The fundamental concept that I get out of this article is that we need to put work in its correct place. Work is not and should not be where we find our life, where we find our identity. Work is very important, and I actually enjoy my work quite a bit, but I don't find my identity in my work. And the danger of doing that, the danger of trying to find your identity in your work is that things are going to go wrong at work.

You may even get fired someday or your company may close down. And if your identity is all tied up in your work, then when something inevitably does go wrong at work, that's gonna have a huge impact on you because that's your identity. Your work and you are the same thing. I mean, listen to what the author says. He says my identity was tied in with my work, so I felt empty if I wasn't pushing excellence.

That's not uncommon. I think that's even pretty normal. I think a lot of people find their identity and how they're performing at work. So then this question is raised. Can you do great work and still have a life?

I think the answer is an absolute and resounding yes. Absolutely, you can. But you're going to have to be intentional about it. You don't just stumble into great work and a great family life. It doesn't just accidentally happen.

And the first thing you need to remember is what we've already talked about, that your identity is not found in your work. Because if you find your identity in your work, you're gonna put everything else second. Work is always going to be number 1. Family, friends, everything else is gonna fall below work because you have so much of your personal self tied up in it. The next thing is work while you're working and don't work while you're not working.

Because we're connected 247, there's this temptation to always feel like you should be doing a little bit of work here and there. But if you're trying to do a little bit of work and you're also trying to hang out with people, your friends or your family, you're short changing both. The work you're doing is not that good, and you're not even really hanging out with the people that you're hanging out with. I love when he says, we act like we can't call a truce with our inbox for long enough to spend time with our kids. Yeah.

You can. You just have to do it. You have to call a truce and say, I'm not working anymore. I'm gonna spend time with my family. This is one that I learned in college when it came time to study.

I didn't like to go hang out slash study with people because I didn't get very much studying done, and I didn't get very much hanging out done. I would study by myself in the library or by myself in my room, and then I was done. And I would go hang out. And I wasn't worried about studying at all because I was done studying. I was able to give each of those two things my full attention, but only one at a time.

And the last thing that I just wanna bring up is something called Parkinson's Law. Parkinson's Law is an adage that says work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Parkinson's Law basically describes how procrastination works. You have a deadline of 8 AM Monday morning, and somehow you finish the project at 7:55 on Monday morning. That's Parkinson's law.

You had until 8, and it took you until 8. So use that to your advantage. Tell yourself, I don't work on weekends, and watch how much stuff actually gets done on Friday afternoon. If you just allow yourself to work more and more and more hours, you may realize that you're not actually getting more done. You're just procrastinating more.

You're just working more, but you're not actually getting more stuff done. So if you set reasonable boundaries on your time, if you set reasonable hours, you're gonna find that you magically become more efficient because you know, well, I go home at 6 o'clock, so I gotta get this done. Whereas if you said, you know, I could stay late. I can work until 8 or 9. It's gonna take you until 8 or 9 o'clock.

This article is all about putting work in its proper place. Work is not your life. Work is not who you are. We shouldn't be treating it as such. Work is important.

Absolutely. But there are things that are more important. Leave work, go home, spend time with your family. Don't let important things become the most important thing. The Music Makers podcast is released twice weekly on Mondays Thursdays at 10 AM CST.

Here's a sneak peek from the next episode. Cool is overrated. So this guy sees a whale and I want you to listen to how excited he is when he sees this whale. You can subscribe in Itunes by searching for the Music Makers, or visit us online by going to musicmakers.fm. And as always, you can reach me at aaron@musicmakers.fm.