Is Contribution All?

It’s popular to extol the “life” part of “work-life balance” and its various manifestations such as exhortations to meditate. The masses have glommed onto such simplisms as “You’re a human being, not a human doing”

Yet, across the 5,600 career and personal advising clients I’ve had over the past 30 years, many if not most of the people who are highly satisfied with their life have a life that's "out of balance.” They work long hours and value doing that.

I make the case for such a life in my PsychologyToday.com article today. 

Milking Every Heartbeat

Perhaps today’s #1 mantra is “work-life balance.” I think that’s misguided. I believe life is better-led when you spend as many heartbeats as possible, perhaps 60 or 70 hours a week, using your best abilities to make the biggest difference to society or at least to your sphere of influence. That’s what I call, milking your heartbeats.

My PsychologyToday.com article today makes the case for the wisdom of that and practically how to make it happen.

Work MORE? The case for eschewing the pursuit of happiness and even work-life balance.

We don’t want to believe the key to success is to work more. That’s why we succumb to such easier prescriptions as believe in yourself, brand yourself, and dream it and you can do it. 

But fact is, unless you’re unusually intelligent and ideally also have a winsome personality, your chances of success—and I believe satisfaction with your life—are far greater if you embrace the less comfortable truth that success requires sustained, focused skill development: spending lots of time getting good.

I make the case in my PsychologyToday.com article today. 

Hedonism vs "Workaholism": A debate

For most people, including the Framers, core to the life well-led is "the pursuit of happiness."

Career corollaries include: "Make work fun," "Prioritize work-life balance," and "Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life." 
Outside-of-work corollaries include: "Life's short. East dessert first," "He who dies with the most toys wins," and "Par-tay!"

Yet some people believe the life well-led is mainly about being productive and contributing, that time spent frivolously could be better spent.

Perhaps the debate I posted on PsychologyToday.com today will help you gain clarity on whether you want to move somewhere new on the hedonist to work-centered continuum. 

Thoughts on Turning 66

I wrote this during the hour before I turned 66.  My thoughts:

I'm filled with gratitude for my health, the opportunity to be productive, and for my good wife. We've been contentedly together for almost 43 years now. Oh, I  must also mention my preternaturally loving doggie Einstein.

Aware that most men my age are on the downswing, I'm working longer hours than ever. That's in the spirit of Isaac Asimov, who had written 450 books and was asked, "What would you do if you had six months to live?" His answer: "Type faster."  Most people can't relate to this but, for me, the life well-led is about using as many heartbeats as possible being productive.

For a very long time, I've been afraid of dying and tried everything to cure myself. What works best for me is simply to distract myself the first moment the fear enters consciousness. 

I'm very disciplined but not about eating. Ironic, I care so much about staying healthy and yet can't stop myself from overeating. I guess few of us are fully explainable by the rational.

Also ironic in that I used to be a committed liberal, I'm sad about the leftist bias of society's mindmolders: the schools, colleges, the media, and GoogleSearch. The relentless message is that Left is always right, that redistribution is justice. While I am liberal on many issues, I deeply believe that wisdom can be found across the ideological spectrum. Yet dare an idea veer right of center, it's censored or censured from society's major mind-molders. For example, Fox News, which, perhaps surprisingly, was found by Pew Research Center  to provide the most balanced coverage, is dwarfed in impact by the leftist-biased New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post, CNN, PBS, NPR, Time, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, etc., etc., etc. Ironic that the Left continues to harp on Joe McCarthy's censorship from the Right of 70 years ago while today it exerts censorship that's far more pervasive.  I don't want to go into details here lest I be viewed as self-pitying but suffice to say that I have often been a victim of that.

Even if I were a leftist, I'd worry about how much control the aforementioned societal mind-molders have over policy. Whatever control the "military-industrial complex" had is dwarfed by society's mind-molders' power. That concentration of power cannot ultimately be good for humankind. 

In closing, thank you for having read my writings. That adds much meaning to my life.

Many People DID Die Wishing They Spent More Time at the Office

It's often been claimed that "No one died wishing they spent more time at the office."

That doesn't comport with some of my friends and colleagues. But that's anecdotal so, for my PsychologyToday.com article today, I reviewed all 3,500 entries in the book: Last Words of Notable people.

While many last words are religious about their spouse or ending their pain, enough speak about wishing they could work more to dispute "No one died wishing they spent more time at the office." 

Whether or not we choose to work more, it certainly seems we should be more accepting of diversity of how people choose to live their lives rather than pathologize work-centric people as "workaholic" or "out of balance." Indeed, per my anecdotal experience and the names on the following list, many highly contributory people, already lifelong hard workers, wished they had or could work more.

Of course, people with less potential for accomplishment might well feel that work-life balance and even a bias toward "life" is wiser. 

In any event, the article offers two dozen people's last words that suggest they wish they had "spent more time at the office" or at least that work, not pleasure, relationships or spirituality, was on their mind at that final moment.

Work-Life Balance is Overrated: Think Twice Before Dubbing People "Workaholics"

Many people who work long hours are more accurately described as "hard workers" or even "heroic" rather than "workaholics."  I make that case in my PsychologyToday.com article today. 

HERE is the link.

A "Workaholic" in Action

It's been a busy few days. On top of my usual full docket of career counseling clients, writing my weekly AOL article and weekly USNews.com article, giving a talk to 100 people at Experience Unlimited, and responding to tons of email, I was on five radio shows, mainly questioning whether work-life balance is a goal we all should strive for.

Indeed work-life-balance activists would label me "out of balance" and a "workaholic," evoking comparison to "alcoholic," addicted to something bad.

In fact, it's all been inordinately energizing. And amid it all, I found time to garden, play the piano, hike every day with my doggie Einstein, help my 88-year-old mom, and hang out with my wife. I will admit I didn't spend any time watching TV, playing golf, etc.

In case you'd like to listen, here are the radio shows I've been on since Sunday:

Of course, I was on my own show (NPR-San Francisco) which I devoted to raising questions about three career "truths."

KGO's (ABC-San Francisco) Ronn Owens Program is among the most listened-to on the West Coast. Talkers magazine named Ronn Owens one of the 25 Greatest Talk Show Hosts of All Time. Monday, I appeared on his show for about my 100th time. The interview was an hour long and covered such topics as: When it is and isn't wise to follow your passion, the pros and cons of for-profit vs. non profit careers, and colleges that still are accepting applications for the fall. HERE is the link.

Also, on Monday, I was on WHYY (NPR-Philadelphia) for an hour questioning whether work-life balance is a goal all people should strive for. I argued that, for example, the clerk who spends workweek hours 40-50 ensuring that everyone is paid promptly should not be denigrated as a workaholic but praised as a hard worker or even a hero. I also explained why shorter hours may not address the real reason people are stressed at work. HERE is an excerpt.

Today, I was on the CBC (Canada's NPR) for an hour, also talking about the whether we are too universally extolling work-life balance and unfairly labeling hard workers with the term "workaholic." The host pretty much took the other side. I leave it to you to decide if I held my own.  HERE is the link to that hour.

And as I mentioned in the previous post, today I offered very basic job-search advice to teens on NPR's Marketplace HERE is the link.

I hope you find these audio recordings useful and maybe even vaguely entertaining.

Eight Career "Truths" That May Not Be So True

In preparation for my University of California, Berkeley Extension Public Lecture this Wednesday, I wrote a draft of what I plan to say.

HERE is the link. I'd welcome your reactions.

Also, it is a public event, so you are invited. The event is free but you're required to register.

In Praise of Work: Work-Life Balance is Overrated

Psychology Today features a weekly column, "Who's Going to be the Next Einstein."

I was flattered that the author of the column, a Duke University research scientist asked me about how to live the life well-led. HERE is the link.

My Philosophy of Life

I present my philosophy of life here in hopes it will encourage you to more consciously decide how you want to live yours.

I believe the best way to live my life is to spend as many waking moments as possible using my best skills (thinking, writing, and speaking) on causes I deeply care about that don't comport with conventional wisdom.

Thus while I am pro-choice and pro gay marriage, others already exert tremendous effort on those. My efforts would be like adding a grain of sand onto a beach.

It feels more worthwhile to debunk the conventional wisdom, for example, that:

• men are treated better than they deserve to be.
• it's wise to have redistributed so many K-16 school resources from kids with the greatest potential to profit to those with the least.
• as President Obama reasserted in his State of the Union address, American higher education is wonderful. I am clear that higher education is America's most overrated product. I've proposed a specific model for its reinvention.

Alas, in choosing to take on unpopular causes, I'm fighting tidal waves with a thimble. That's one reason I'm usually sort of sad, but I'd be sadder if I reallocated time to other pursuits.

To give myself some successes, I do career coaching and speak and write on career-related matters, and pursue social change in one politically correct way: promoting peer mentoring, which was popular in the '80s but gave way to the next innovation du jour.

So, what's your philosophy of life, your approach to living the life well-led?

Is it wiser to work long hours or to have balance?

The older we get, the more we realize we only have a limited amount of time to do the things we believe are important. Conventional wisdom is--especially among women--that rather than work more hours, it's wiser to spend the time on relationships and pleasures. I believe that is wrong if your work will do more good overall than the additional time spent on relationships, and especially if you work would not be done or done as well by others. So, I believe that working "crazy" hours and being dubbed a workaholic (while being sure you don't unduly exhaust yourself) is, for many people, key to a life well-led.