88 – Work-Life Balance or Hustle – Life Unsettled

We’ve all heard people talking about work-life balance, and: How are you supposed to have it? It’s a choice. Let’s talk a little bit about work-life balance versus the hustle, that is you hear people saying: “Work smart, hustle, keep going,” etc. and then you have these other people trying to tell you about work-life balance. Let’s take a look at the two, because there’s really a lot to each story.

Some gurus preach Work-Life Balance while others lecture the importance to hustle. Balancing work and life is a personal preference with consequences

First, work-life balance, as defined by Wikipedia, it’s listed as a concept including the proper prioritizing between work, which they include as career and ambition, and balancing with lifestyle, meaning health, pleasure, leisure, family, spiritual development/meditation. So what does that all mean? I’m not going to say that one is better than the other, but I am going to say that whatever you make as a choice, it is your choice. Don’t be jealous of the person that hustles and doesn’t have a proper work-life balance, but has a lot of success in whatever they’re doing. That was their choice, you choose something else. That’s okay. But it’s just we each have our own priorities.

Now, if you want to have a little bit of both, that is you really want to have that work-life balance as well as be very, very successful, the only way you’re going to carve out that bit of extra time is through better time management. Go to www.LifeUnsettled.com/time and get some of my suggestions there so that you can get more time out of life. But I’m not saying you have to do that either. These are two really important topics to think about.

One of the reasons that life-work balance comes into play a lot, some it has to do with the fact that you should have fun, and that’s good, but a lot of it has to do with pressure. Just like you have the pressure to hustle, you have the pressure in a sense to devote more time to your family, more time to other things/activities that you’re supposed to be involved in. In either way, there’s stress going both ways. Where does it all stem from? Many years ago, not too many, but many years ago there was that one person in the household, usually the guy, (almost always the guy) who was working and he was supporting the family. That meant that whatever school, house they bought, place they went, whether they had a vacation or not, what things they were able to get, how they were able to live was all determined entirely on how he performed, and everything that he did at the job he was captive at in order to get the most income he could to provide for the family the best he could. The pressure was all on him.

Then what happens is, and sometimes it’s featured in movies and you see the movie shows some guy that: “He’s not putting in his time with his family. His kids are less involved with him, they don’t appreciate him because he’s never around.” Part of that is the job of the female in this case (right now it can be switched around; it can be the guy staying home and the woman working), but in either case, the one who is staying home, it’s part of their responsibility to make sure that the kids understand what’s going in, why dad has to work late, etc. and that yes, he would like to be home, yes, he would like to go to some game or something else. I hope he would anyway. But there are those kinds of pressures that if he doesn’t he’s not going to get the next promotion, he’s not going to get the bonus, he’s not going to get whatever.

So what you really have is a situation which society has turned upside down in essence because the pressure was all on the man many years ago that would determine everything about their family’s lifestyle, etc. Now there’s much more of dual income or in some cases, in many cases the woman making more money.