I’ve always wanted to be successful at work, but I also want to be a good husband and father. It always seemed like to be great at one you have to sacrifice the other. At least that is what things certainly look like. You see the executives in your company working long hours, trying to survive and get ahead. To accomplish that more often than not their family comes in second. Unfortunately I struggled with a similar situation the past few months, we were going through the process of building a new house. For anyone that hasn’t gone through it there are thousands of decisions to be made, every day we had to talk about the house. To make things worse I took on the insane task of trying to save ourselves some money by doing some of the work myself. I added it up and in a 3 month span, I worked the equivalent of 2 full time jobs, my regular job, and working on the house. Needless to say that is one of the reasons I didn’t write hear for a while. It also meant giving up time with my family. It was hard on us, especially my wife practically having to be a single mother for some time, but we knew it was short term and would get us the house of our dreams. Being moved in and settled now, it feels like it was worth it, to see life return to normal. I achieved something great but it did involve a sacrifice.
During all those hours, mostly alone, I was able to do a lot of thinking, about people that work 70, 80 or more hours every week. How fulfilling could that possibly be? If you find success in that, more power to you, but why can’t you be great at finding balance. Be an incredibly talented worker, that does a great job and helps your company succeed, but goes home at the end of the day to spend time with your family? Every day that goes by is another day that you can never get back. I look at being great at something could be anything, from being great at work, to being great with your family, to being great at finding a balance with both. Whatever you want to be great at is what is important, not what others say should be important to you or what is important to them. Understanding that about yourself is the hard part, once you figure it out I think greatness becomes easy. Here’s to you and I figuring that out.
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