Live or Lose

I am currently sitting in a movie theater at 3:30PM watching Identity Thief and writing this blog post. I am able to peal out of the office for 90 minutes because I worked until 1AM and the fun resumed at 7AM and I plowed through my task list this morning. I love what I do, I love my life and I wish there were more hours in the day.

Now I’m telling you this because this “workaholic” behavior is generally seen as wrong by many writers and experts. Life should be in balance they say and almost everyone agrees about walls between work and home life and personal hobbies. If you’ve read as many self help garbage books as I have you would know that a common theme is balance: without separating everything and doing it 100% you are not living right.

Now I am not an author. I am also not in charge of a criminal multilevel pyramid scheme. I am not the homeless guy at the bus stop offering advice about a life full of regrets that has passed me by.

What I am however is a CEO of a multimillion dollar worldwide company.. And I’ve worked for or employed or managed or been a business partner with thousands of people literally around the world. And you know what I’ve learned about the difference between successful and unsuccessful people?

Successful people never stop. Failures can’t wait for a break, for time to go home, for the weekend, for vacation time… They wait.

Successful people take advantage of every opportunity no matter how small or quick – power naps, working vacations, mini vacations. Failures go big, make grand plans and just push off.

The problem with all the feel good bullshit life/career balance is that it guides people towards becoming depressed losers. The strive for balance leaves people perpetually unfulfilled. They feel bad about their long term delayed balanced parts not coming to fruition so they come to work all pissed off. Their performance at work slips and they get mad at their coworkers. Now instead of liking the people that pay them or contribute to their success they associate them with problems in their life and have an absolute agony of a career. They go home, even more upset and drained, and try to balance their misery at work with drugs and alcohol and excessive partying, working out or anything away from work. They defriend and push away their work friends but the misery remains because the life out of balance striving for balance also starts to rub on whoever is left around – friends, family.. The feeling that life is imperfect and can somehow be brought to perfection crushes otherwise good people.

Don’t let others make you feel like there is something wrong with your workaholism. There isn’t. Successful career leads to a successful personal life which leads to everything else turning to success. Its not all roses and butterflies, its never going to be. But the more you try to build walls and compartmentalize your life and filter people life and wait for things to happen… The worse you are gonna feel and all the self-help books and gurus and advisors and coaches and all their collective bullshit won’t be enough to fill the hole that will be left in your life that you should be living instead of balancing and organizing.

Just live and enjoy the opportunity to do so from every single minute you get.

Have a great weekend.