Work-Life Balance… Or is it Work-Life Balancing Act?

               This week I learned a lot about priorities and my work-life balance.  I heard from entrepreneur, Randy Komisar in one video saying that as a CEO work-life balance doesn’t work, and I heard in another video by Meg Cadoux Hirshberg that you have to work hard at maintaining a balance, and yet another from Corey Bell where he just built the business to reflect his own values.  The real trick is that it all comes down to you in the end.

               The word ‘balance’ implies that we have to have both sides in equilibrium.  This doesn’t mean that it has to be 50-50, but it can’t be fluctuating randomly however it wants.  Many of us don’t like talking and thinking about money much less the way it effects our family, but in this article by Stephen Gibson he says, “No matter who we are or what we are doing in life, money is a necessary part of it.”  We need to decide what balance we want in our lives and compare that with what lifestyle we want to lead.  Gibson says that it’s all about how we see money, how we get it, and what we do with it.  Gibson claims that “Money has great power” but he also states “money in and of itself is neither good nor evil.”  As responsible adults we can choose if money and therefor work is our master or our servant.  “Money can make good men better, but on the other hand it usually makes bad men worse.”

               In the end we need to work.  That is a fact of life.  If we don’t work we won’t survive, and if we do it will be at the detriment of others.  We need money to take care of our families, and that takes time and effort, some of which may come out of time and effort that we need for our families.  We need to make a decision on what that balance is going to be taking into account our family situation, our desired style of living and our physical needs.  Again, it does not have to be a perfect 50-50 balance, but it does have to balance in equilibrium, and that’s up to each of us to discover for ourselves and our families.

Take Time To Try

               Out of all the things I read and watched this week, the most impactful to me was the video, License to Pursue Dreams.  This video is a brief clip from Marissa Mayer who is basically just a big boss at google.  She discusses how at google, they allow their employees to spend 20% of their time working on whatever they want to work on.  The biggest point she made was that out of all the google project launches of the last six months at the time of this speech, 50% of them stemmed from this 20% of free work time.  Thinking about that, it’s incredible that one fifth of the work-hours at google produced one half of their products that made it to market.  She specifically says that “it turns out when you take really smart people and give them really good tools, they build really beautiful amazing things that are really exciting”. 

Now, I’m not saying that every business should pay their employees one day every week to watch Netflix or anything like that.  I’m not even saying that you should pay them one day a week to be at work and do whatever they want.  What I AM saying is that we need to take some time to pursue our own interests.  If we work 20% of our time, or even just 15% of a year, a week  or even a day, then we will see incredible results.  We don’t have to measure it, but we have to put effort into it.  We need to take time out to work on what we want to work on.  We don’t need to take this time to chill or relax, but to work on something productive that is our very own.  This is what will bring us a huge portion of our effective creative output.

Success through Values

             This week I was able to learn the importance of maintaining my values during the process of building my business.  We as entrepreneurs and leaders can choose what kind of environment we want to have within our organization and what way we want to work in, and this week I learned that we need to work in a way that we can have trust, positivity, and capability.  I watched three lectures by Guy Kawasaki, Frank Levinson, and Carly Fiorina, who’s name you might recognize from the Republican Primary Race for the presidential nomination.

               Guy talked about trust by stating that a business needs to trust people before people can trust the business.  He mentions examples of Zappos and Amazon that trust people to make returns and be honest about that.  This isn’t exactly a traditional reference, but it reminds me of the current fifth season of ‘The Arrow’ on CW.  Oliver Queen, or the green arrow, gathers together a new team and wants them to trust him and listen to him, but his assistant, Felicity Smoak, insists that he has to trust them first.  When he reveals his true identity and lets them know about his life a little bit, then they do begin to trust them.  Guy Kawasaki mentions that as a business owner, we need to trust our customers before we can expect our customers to trust us.

               Frank Levinson talks about how they try to hire nice people and let them have a good work/life balance so that they can get and keep good people in their business.  We have to keep our lives in balance and let others do it in order to live a fulfilled life.  There is no use in working ourselves or others to death to try and be successful because no one will have the opportunity to enjoy that success.

               Carly Fiorina talks about three keys to being a successful leader: capability, collaboration, and character.  I focused on capability because I had already gleaned some insights on the other two from Frank Levinson’s lecture.  She talks about keeping innovation and creativity alive to be able to adapt.  That is what she said leads to a successful business and happy life.  Levinson also mentioned in respect to this keeping lines of communication open with customers.  We need to hear them, because they ALWAYS know what’s wrong.  If we want to help people, we need to listen to people and apply creative solutions to their problems.  That is how we help others and make our lives happier and more productive, not to mention successful. 

What does the Future Hold, or Can WE Hold the Future?

            This week I’ve had lots of time to think about the future.  We have our first child due in April, we don’t currently have an apartment big enough to have a child, we can hardly afford to move right now and I don’t really have a job with enough income to make any of that happen.  So, with all that in mind, what does the future hold?

               With any luck, I think just maybe I can hold the future instead.  This week I was inspired to understand that it doesn’t necessarily matter where we are at on the journey, we can have bright hope.  I understood this week that no matter what we don’t know, we can work with what we DO know so that we can carve out our own future.  For you guys out there, here are a few of the resources I looked through this week that let us know that the future is bright: http://www.actonhero.org/ https://vimeo.com/28080897 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nczw6xHJ0I

               I’ve been really stressed out this week, but some of these readings taught me that everything would be ok.  My dōTerra business isn’t picking up the way I expected it to, and neither is my other part time job, but guess what?  I am doing better in school than I ever have done before and I have time and opportunities to expand my horizons through other jobs, internships or service. I can come home to my beautiful wife who is pregnant with our first child, and I can put some soothing oils in our diffuser and suddenly the world is ok.  With my drive and my wife’s support, I can do anything. We can do anything.  Anybody can do anything!