Overworked vs. overlived | Accounting Today

The following statement is going to ruffle some feathers, but here we go: Work-life balance is a myth. As productivity guru, David Allen, once said: “You can do anything, but not everything.” 

If you’re in the early stages of your career, you’ll likely choose one of two paths:

1. Overworked. You choose to focus on your career by working long hours and gaining as many skills, experiences and professional contacts as you can. You’ll feel overworked at times, but that diligence will hopefully pay off down the road. By working your tail off and acquiring some battle scars early on, you’ll eventually have great skills, contacts and hopefully a decent bankroll. At this point, you’ll have a wide variety of options about what you want to do next. 

2. Overlived. You choose to take advantage of your freedom, good health and youth. You want to enjoy yourself, pursue your passions and take in as many life experiences as possible before “settling down” into career and family life. Money may be tight, but you’ll have a lifetime of memories, and a robust social media feed. Great. But that could lead you to approaching the next stage in your life/career with noticeably fewer career skills and work experiences. 

Which camp is the right camp?  This is totally up to you.  

I know this may sound stark, because most young people will tell you they want a balance between paying their dues at work and enjoying life. But fast forward 10 years and they almost never find the balance they hoped for. Ask any successful person who claims to have great work-life balance and they’ll tell you about how hard they worked as a young professional, how tough their bosses were, how many red-eye flights they endured flying coach and how much adversity they had to overcome. They have flexibility that seems attractive now because they have already put in the hard work. Now they can reap the rewards of their early sacrifices. To borrow a sports analogy: You have to do the reps; you have to do the work if you want to make gains.

Another way to look at the overworked vs. overlived dilemma is to ask yourself what kind of a team do you want to be on at this stage of your life? 

Do you want to be on a Super Bowl champion like the Kansas City Chiefs or do you want to be on a fun-loving cellar-dweller like the Texas State Fighting Armadillos from the 1991 movie Necessary Roughness. That team partied all the time, had no scholarship players, and relied on a 40-year-old has-been quarterback to lead them. 

If you’re a young person starting your career, you’re not pursuing a job as much as you’re choosing a team. Some of the teams “recruiting” you will stress their culture: “We have flexible hours. Everyone’s really nice. The pay is decent. We have pizza every Friday and fun team-building exercises,” they’ll tell you. “Sure, we get some work done, but it’s really about balance and having a good time,” they’ll add. Think Michael Scott and the fictional Dunder Mifflin paper company from The Office.

But other teams, like the high-performing ones, will tell you straight off the bat that you’re going to work long hours, and you won’t get to work from home or choose which days you get off. They also won’t sugarcoat how stressful work will be at times. Their expectation is that stress within reason can be a good tool for leveraging better performance.

So why would you want to join a team like that?

Because those teams are at the top of the profession. Their culture is about everyone growing and pursuing excellence. It won’t be as much fun on this team, but after a few years, you’ll have incredible skills and experience to put on your resume and an enormous network of contacts who can help you throughout your career. Many members of the New England Patriots championship dynasty didn’t love playing for Coach Bill Belichick, but they sure loved the bonus money and the Super Bowl trophies.

Here’s the key: If you don’t want to practice hard, and you don’t care about winning games or championships and you aren’t passionate about getting better, then pick the easier, fun-loving team. There’s nothing wrong with that. But when you look back 10 years from now, which team will you say you wish you were on? 

The really nice team, with the calm, relaxing, supportive environment may not have had high expectations, but the stress level was low and you’ll have made good friends there. But how many games did you win? The other team told you: “We’re here to work hard. We’re here to do great work for our favorite clients, whom we love being a resource for. They come to us because they know we’re the champions.” This level of commitment comes at a cost. Do some people get burned out on a championship team like that? Sure. That kind of culture isn’t for everyone. 

No shortcuts to success

It all comes down to how much you want to grow and how fast you want to grow. Ben Horowitz’s book The Hard Thing About Hard Things shows there are no shortcuts to success. Anyone who tells you they “work smart, not hard” has already put their reps in and pushed through a lot of adversity to get to where they are today. Again, there’s nothing wrong with taking a more laid-back approach to your career. Just set your goals accordingly. 

If I’ve learned one important lesson throughout my life and career, it’s that the harder thing is usually the right thing. It’s usually the path to fulfillment. As author Jerzy Gregorek said, “Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.”

How did you decide which team you wanted to be on? I’d love to hear from you.