Work Life Balance

If you care about work-life balance, you’re never going to make it anywhere near the top in any profession.

You can have one or the other, but you simply can’t have BOTH.

It’s something nobody likes to hear. But it’s the plain unvarnished truth.

What's even more?

This thing we like to deride as ‘the rat race’? Yeah guess what, that so-called ‘rat race’ is the mother of every great advancement in civilization.

1. Pertinent now to the first point (i.e. reaching the top of a profession). When my father had established his independent practice as a successful attorney (working 12–14 hour days six days a week for several years), he started hiring junior lawyers, men and women straight out of law school in their twenties.
   
   And one day he said to me about one of his juniors “He leaves every day at 6 p.m. to be with his wife and kids. I can tell right away that he’ll never have his own legal practice, he’ll always work for a senior attorney.”It sounded rather harsh to me, but the man was right both with respect to that junior (he worked for my father for over a decade, while ambitious juniors would learn the trade and leave within 2–3 years) as well as in general.
2. Onto the second point now. We have a culture in which working long hours is looked down upon and work-life balance is seen as a wiser choice, if not the holy grail. All major advances in society and civilization come from people who don’t give a damn about work-life balance.It isn’t about money. The top scientists who publish the most papers, work like mad. Because it’s a straight-up race between research groups. We all know that successful entrepreneurs put in an ungodly amount of work hours but pick any profession. Law, science, medicine, business, finance, sports, politics. Any. Those athletes you see in the finals at the Olympics? Yeah, guess how much ‘work-life balance’ they had growing up!
   
   We often pity or even laugh at these people who work crazy hours as if their priorities were all messed up - all of our fantastic technologies and inventions, great research discoveries, creative breakthroughs, successful businesses come from these souls who couldn’t care less about having a personal life.

It’s not rocket science, but a simple equation -

No matter how talented or brilliant you may be, at some point in the latter rounds of the competition you are up against people just as smart as you and willing to work like mad.

Then what? Tell me how are you going to beat them if you care about work-life balance? It's like entering the boxing ring with one hand tied behind your back - your opponent will pound your face into hamburger.

No, go home and be well with your family, enjoy your balanced life, because you’re out of this race already.

This isn’t to say that people who choose to have a work-life balance are making a foolish decision. No. To each his/her own priorities.

But people need to understand that this fashionable thinking about having it all, is plainly unrealistic.

You know, I see corporations and employers increasingly pitching their best quality to new young hires as work-life balance. And when I hear that, the first thing I think is “They’re setting these people up to never reach the top.” As an interviewer when I ask a candidate why s/he wants to come work with us and s/he says “Because you guys offer a great work-life balance.”, I may hire them but I know right away this person isn’t advancing beyond a certain point. My professional advice to young and ambitious people starting out in any profession is “Work-life balance ought to be the last thing on your mind.”

I often say,

“Thank goodness for the minority of souls who don’t care about work-life balance. Because it is they who advance the human race in every sphere. The history of the world is the history of work.”

 -Allen Lobo  (MBBS-Nagpur University, MD-Nagpur University,MBA-University of North Carolina,PhD in Molecular Physics -University of Pennsylvania)