Two themes come up frequently in my conversations and in my reading about other entrepreneurs: work/life balance and ‘the bottom line’.
The former doesn’t exist, and the latter isn’t the reason you’re in business.
If you’re in business for the right reasons, you love what you do; It’s what gets you out of bed in the morning. Of course you love your family; of course you have other interests besides work. No respectable person puts work before family; no reasonable person has only one interest, to the exclusion of all others.
But you better love what you do, especially if you’re self-employed. Honestly, why would you hire yourself to do a job you don’t like?
So let’s assume that your job is just another manifestation of your passion.
Do you really expect to take it off and put it on like a sweater? And what does it have to do with money?
Sometimes I work late nights and miss family time because I’m in the area. Sometimes. But, just as often; more often, actually, i take time in the middle of a ‘work day’ to spend time with my wife, my daughters, my friends. I take time, right in the middle of the week, outside of work and the office, to share spiritual activities with my family. I stop work at 4:00 most days to work on an album of jazz songs that I’m writing with my oldest daughter; So, I go back to what I was doing. Now I don’t. I keep my goals loose and flexible whenever possible, so I can decide how to spend my time.
Work/life balance means being balanced in my own head, not balanced on a clock or calendar.
And money? Come on; I would do 90% of what I am doing right now, even if I had enough money to retire. I love to write. I love coaching solo professionals, writers, musicians, helping them better communicate with their prospects and fans to establish trust and build relationships. I love my web business; Sort out what’s needed, design tools, do usability studies, help clients build what they really need instead of what they think they need. (Okay, if I really had money, I’d leave the coding to someone more talented than me.)
I love barter. If someone has a skill that I can benefit from and needs something that they can do, I want to work with them. What I don’t want is to turn our genuine human care into a commercial enterprise. Iron crying out loud; the goal of my consulting business and my writing is to do the exact opposite, make business more human, stop behaving like abstract soulless entities and start talking, trusting and caring like real human beings do.
Work-life balance is how you choose to serve yourself and your loved ones, every minute of every day; decisions about the long term, not about the moment.
And, in the long run, it’s not about money. Never.