Engineer Your Path from the End First.

I took some time off this past week. What basically added up to a long weekend, but it was needed. Made me think about work/life balance. I hear many people talking about the freedom they want with work. I don’t really think that’s the point though.

If you’re expectation is that you can gain now, what you want your life to look like in the future without any understanding of the journey and cost required to get there, then you might have set yourself up for failure, disappointment, or both. I’ve become more and more convinced that money is simply a tool to allow for transaction back in terms of personal time use. If you don’t have a real need for more money, do what you want. Everyone else, is beholden to a rule of constraints.

If you’re just starting out from school at whatever level, don’t try to gain the job you want to have in 20 years and for which the requirement to add value in that position will be 20 years of setting your hands to a task. You either, don’t add enough value back to the business for that transaction to make sense on the other side or you’ll be overpaid and the first to be released during the bad days.

“Well, I’ll just start my own business.” is the other response I think I’m going to hear. I hope you do, also that’s not just sunshine and rainbows. If you’re starting that for the right reason, which is to truly solve a problem, then it’s still a 20 year journey to build a business.

Even if you get that dream job in your early 20’s, it’s not your dream job. Been there. Landed my dream job after a decade of work and was out 3 years later because it wasn’t that after all. Your life is more than work and work is a significant part of your life. Learn to enjoy the journey of that more than an end that you’ll never catch.

That does not mean, don’t think about what you want your life to look like in 20 years. Start with the end in mind and engineer your path accordingly.

Interested what the rest of you think. Like if you agree, comment if you differ in thought. Will post more about work/life integration and how that might work. In the meantime, here’s a pic of a sunset from this weekend.