We’ve got an amazing thread going on on amplifize focusing on a New Yorker article about the ill effects of working too much.
I’ve ended up on the other end of the debate (as seems to happen a lot lately) advocating for overwork when applied towards achieving a degree of excellence. In my mind the goal is to get to the now idolized 10,000 hours before the gal (or guy) next to you beats you there. My brother, in his newly elevated eloquence, came back and challenged me by saying that excellence should be achieved in pursuit of a life well lived. He started and ended by asking me what I wanted to be excellent at. Here is my response.
The number one thing I want to be excellent at is being a father. When I think about the amount of time I put into this, I’ve definitely passed into the zone of overwork. That probably sounds ridiculous since fatherhood is considered by many to be a 24-hour job, but that is in fact a lie. It takes all of 30 seconds to become a father biologically. After that, the choice, and depth, of fatherhood is completely on the individual. The level to which anyone can invest should have checks and balances. I don’t think I’ve found my checks or balances. It’s definitely hurt me in relationships with friends. It’s also definitely made it harder for me to justify networking events, after works drinks, and the like. The costs are real, but the benefits are real as well. Overworking as a father is a choice that I continue to make. The only real concern that I have is that I haven’t found a good over-recover cycle to balance it. This is a challenge I need to address.
After that (for me) is to leave behind a legacy of a product excellently built, and, at this point in my career, I can still selfishly hope for it to be products plural. To build excellent products requires diving not only into the problem space, but the mind of the end-user, the architecture of the right solution, and the journey of the product life cycle. People specialize immediately in their careers because specialization is often interchanged with expertise. I don’t think this is true. A corner of a component of a product is as unaware of the whole as my left ear. And yet when I put it together with my right ear, the whole of my head, and the rest of my parts, you get a full picture of the product that is me. I think building excellent products requires being able to dive deep into the left ear while understanding that it’s a person you’re building, and not a microphone. Experts tend to confuse the microphone for the ear when in fact one simply mimics another. There is an obsessive tendency to building excellent products that leads to overwork, and I think it can be detrimental to the overall experience and outcome. Finding the release parachute when it’s needed is a hard fought battle with oneself, and one that I know I often lose. Nonetheless, I don’t know how else to build excellent product but with both feet jumping straight in.
Finally, I want to be an excellent husband. This means being more patient, a better listener, quicker with my kindness, and slower with my smart ass nature. This one is the hardest for me because I actually don’t know what it looks like. There’s no one else to compare to for an excellent husband for Micky. The lack of a yard stick means that no one else can ever beat me, but that I can also never know if I’ve done it or not. That vagueness, that abstractness, makes it hard for me to know if I’ve entered overwork or not. You could argue the same is true for the kids, and you’d be correct, but I’ve felt much less loss at striving to be an excellent husband than I have at being an excellent father. Maybe loss is the measuring stick, and in not losing enough (or trading off enough), I haven’t gone far enough. That’s actually a great question to ask. In general though, I find the pursuit of being excellent for her makes me better not only at this task but the other two above as well. It’s an unintended benefit which I’ll gladly take.
I think if I pull off all three of those things, then I will have lived an excellent life. It will have been put to the test, and found sufficient. I think ultimately, it will be something that someone at sometime points to and says – I’d like for that to be me.
It’s a great conversation we’re having. I’m very lucky to be so challenged by such a great group.