Balancing work and life

You can be addicted to improvement in such a pathological way that there's nothing else in your world than just improvement on a single track. That, too, I rejected quite early on both in life and my career. Again, acceptance that we're never going to be number one, not interested in chasing it. But I'll be good at a lot of things. You can become good at a lot of things if you don't allow one single pursuit to dominate everything forever, which again comes with that trade off that you're not going to be the best. There's only going to be one Michael Jordan.

All he did for that period of time that he was active was freaking go to the court and shoot baskets, right? The whole life and everything around was optimized for that. And I've gone, "I don't want that." I want to be good at running a business, so I'm going to do that diligently for about 40 hours a week. Then I'm going to spend my weekends at a race track, or traveling, or with my family or friends, or any of these other things that provide in my assessment a well-rounded existence that is something where, if any one of those individual things should falter, the business starts going sour or I can't progress in my racing or whatever, I have other legs to lean on here. It's not going to be the only one. I'm not going to tip over just because there's a single pursuit in life or single factor of my existence that if not falls apart, then falls sideways.

There's periods of time where I'm completely and utterly focused on work because that's where my brain is at the time. There's other times when I know what I need and what's good for where I'm working is for me to take a step back. I had a lovely weekend where I completely disconnected for five days. That's great. It's all about balance and working out what balance is going to work well for you.

And I call it the spinning plates. Because even if you are completely focusing on satisfaction at work, you still need to spin that happy plate. You still need to spin that self-care plate. And there are times when you see those plates wobble and that's when you need to go, right, I need to take a step back and go focus on that one.

It's tough, because I feel like our work is so much a part of our waking hours. If you think about the time you spend awake, for most people at least half of that time is spent at work, doing work, surrounded by colleagues. So I think on a practical level, it's hard to completely divorce yourself from your professional identity. And one of the very first questions that people often ask when you're meeting them, either personally or professionally at an event, is, "What do you do?" And this is something I talked about in my TED Talk. It's just a really hard, separate part of us to completely carve off and to completely compartmentalise.

I think that it's important to have a personal and a professional life, and I don't feel like the two necessarily need to overlap. And I actually think it's healthy for them not to, but there's usually some overlap. And just being aware that your personal life is going to affect your professional life, and your professional identity is going to influence how you feel personally. So I don't pretend that they're separate entities. I think that they're very much intertwined.

I spent my hours, days, if not years, living unconsciously, just being carried away by work. Wake up, there is something in the inbox. There is something in the calendar. I do it, we set goals, and there is a lot of work that just carried me instead of me taking a deep breath, stepping back and saying, ‘Okay, no, let's pause for a second. Let's stop all this. Let's pause for a second, let's stop all this chaos, and let's actually ask questions about what needs to be done in the first place.’

And this is a skill. This is a skill that I wish I learned earlier, and this is a skill that I only learned when I saw it in other people, it was not something which was role-modelled for me in my family or at university.

Work is just one lens of purpose, and if things start going wrong and you've only got one thing, work, and things don't go the way that you want them to, they're not running as smoothly, it's very hard for you then to come back and say, "Hey, I'm still doing well in life," if you've just got things in one bucket of work. So that's why it should align with what I want to do in life and it should align with my values, but it's not my reason for being, if that makes sense.