Every few months on Twitter, there’s some dustup about work-life
balance and whether it’s a good or bad idea to work hard when you’re
young. Like most of these recurring debates, it has generated two
opposite archetypes:
The anti-capitalist tells the young worker not to trust HR and not to
buy into the idea of work as family. Your employment contract is the
only thing that binds you to your job, and that can be terminated on
either side. Arrive at 9, leave at 5. Prioritize the family.
The hustlebro tells you to wake up at 7am and get to work, and
give it your all. Hustle, and earn as much as you can, build those
connections. You can get work-life balance when you’re older, your
early 20s are the time for making that cheddar and staying
up till 1am.
In the short form, it’s hard to take a stance and not get grouped
into either extreme. It’s also hard not to feel baited by someone
who’s engagement-farming their social media presence by using
time-tested bait questions.
This last time I responded something like:
work really hard and take everything very seriously
But I deleted it. A truism as an answer will lead people
to all kinds of unintended conclusions about me and whatever I’m
saying. I’ll need to use more words.
Wisdom is acquired by experience
I think the honest answer is that most people can’t gain perspective
and moderation and maturity by reading someone’s advice online.
The wise 35-year old dads on Twitter can follow their own advice
about work-life boundaries because they’ve suffered the consequences.
There’s no shortcut to perspective:
you have to acquire it by experiencing bad things and suffering consequences.
Energy begets energy
I attribute a lot of my career path to my working really hard
and caring a lot about things. I quickly internalized the
lesson that a 9-5 job wouldn’t teach me enough, and wouldn’t give me
all the intellectual stimulation or rigor that I wanted – so
I worked longer hours, worked on side projects, hunted down my
interests like a puppy chasing a squirrel.
The thing is, when you find a good thing to focus on, a thing to
pour energy into, it can be positive-sum. It can give you energy
in the rest of your life, give you a sense of purpose. The human
body is not like a battery with a finite amount of energy.
There are lots of things you can do, like exercise, learning, and practice,
that can be rewarding and increase your ability. This is obvious,
right?
If you have that thing that drives you, and that thing isn’t work
and can never be work, then sure – get the lightest-duty job
you can. Pour time into that thing. Maybe what you do at work is
your main output, or part of your output, or just what you do
for money.
Most jobs don’t give you time to learn
Many jobs, especially in technology, don’t have real,
intentional, educational components. There is no time set-aside
for learning, no time to practice, and no dedicated instructor.
It’s unlikely that what you learned in college fully prepared
you for the job. It’s possible that you’ll have a wonderful
mentor with lots of time to spare, but probably not.
I’ve worked with people who are smart enough to learn everything
on the job, from 9-5. I’m not one of them. For me, to really
understand something, I need to build it two or three times,
write about it, use it incorrectly, and learn the consequences.
Working hard meant playing around, having fun, but essentially
playing with a lot of things that were not directly part of
what I was paid to do at that time. This, honestly, worked out
extremely well and some of those things led to jobs and
opportunities that I never would have had otherwise. Writing
this blog is one of those things.
Working hard on boring repetitive stuff is bad
Probably the biggest caveat to this whole post is that working
hard in my experience was never working double-shifts or “hustling”
for money or having multiple jobs. There are a million kinds of work
that you simply don’t learn anything from, after a point. Thankfully,
technology work is usually accretive, as are other sorts of
knowledge-work.
Maybe you don’t want to do this, but I did
Maybe you don’t want to follow that path. That’s fine: not everyone
is compelled by learning or intellectual rabbit-holes or exists
in an industry where it’s pretty easy to self-educate. Or wants
to “max out” their career. And it’s dangerous to generalize from
a single experience. And it’s also dangerous to judge “a career”
based on external appearances, which don’t tell you whether the
person turned out to be happy, or rich. I haven’t maxed out either
of those things, but I have few career regrets: I’ve always
cared most about building useful things and learning and I think
I’ve nearly maxed out those categories.
This is the answer to that question, of what advice could I have
for someone in their early 20s. Well, that’s what I did – I worked
pretty hard and was pretty unrestrained in pursuing interests.
It worked out fine. Now that I’m older, my priorities have shifted
slightly and I spend a little more time on other things, and am
slowly becoming more balanced. But balance isn’t how I got here.
Balance isn’t how a lot of the people I admire got to where they
are now.
I’m all for moderation, but sometimes it seems
Moderation itself can be a kind of extreme - Andrew Bird
When your priorities shift, you’ll know
In the end, most people gain responsibilities. You’ll have a
baby or a family member to take care of, or a thriving social life
that demands more of your time. Your priorities will snap into place
and you’ll realize that you care about new things. This is great.
This will probably happen. But before you have those new
responsibilities, you don’t have those new responsibilities.
You have time to try and build a ‘rocket ship’ startup or chase
down silly projects or learn a new instrument or run a thousand
miles a year. Do that stuff. You don’t have to prematurely act like
you’re older.
So, heed the warnings of those 30-somethings about burnout and
workplace boundaries. And don’t work 24/7 on busywork for a startup
if you’re not learning anything.
You can burn out by going too fast, or your flame can dim because
you don’t let yourself spend silly amounts of time on silly projects
to satisfy your intellectual curiosity. Beware of both outcomes:
cultivate your enthusiasm for the things you want to hang onto.
It isn’t a revolutionary idea that people who are excellent in
their fields often get there by trying really hard. If you can
figure out the difference between busy-work that only benefits
your employer, and the kind of work that makes you as a person
feel like you’re making progress and becoming more skilled,
then you’re ready to learn.