You get instant feedback and, oftentimes, instant gratification in the form of raises, promotions, new contracts, or general approbation. The arc of family life is different: it can be banal, boring, or discouraging in the short term.
Harvard happiness researcher Daniel Gilbert has shown that children don’t increase parents’ short-term happiness; in fact, on a day-to-day basis, parents prefer almost anything (from watching television to exercising) to spending time with their kids. Work is certainly one societally sanctioned excuse. Many professionals are dismayed to wake up in midlife and discover frayed relationships, divorces, and alienation from their family. We have to grasp the difference between the short and long-term rewards of work and our personal lives.
Often, we misunderstand the relationship between happiness and success. We assume that professional triumph comes first: I’ll be happy when I make SVP! I’ll be happy when I get into the right graduate school! I’ll be happy when I make the 40 Under 40 list! But that’s actually backward. Instead, “Happiness is…the precursor to greater success. Every single relationship, business and educational outcome improves when the brain is positive first.” In other words, success is a result of happiness, not the other way around. And yet, so many executives work tirelessly, questing for a goal — happiness — that doesn’t come from professional achievement.
For many top performers, the idea of dialing back on work is also disturbing because they fear it will torpedo their career. Partly, of course, this anxiety is exaggerated. Since humans fear loss more than they covet gain, it’s easy to frame any deceleration as the loss of our career potential and a potentially disastrous mistake.
Even when it’s not all about us, the pressure to keep working full-tilt can be intense. Successful people say, “There are a lot of people that depend on me — the people who report to me, the people I mentor, and my clients. It’s very hard to turn away from them and let them down. I get emails and phone calls every day: "we missed you at the meeting." Grappling with divided loyalties can be challenging. It hurts because some of them can sound scolding.”
Even when we know working to excess isn’t good for us, it’s hard to cut back. Most of us aren’t as extreme as the investment bank intern who died in London after allegedly working 72 hours straight to impress his bosses. But, we may not be that different, either: it’s a matter of degree, and timing. Overwork may not kill us tomorrow, but — if left unaddressed — it may kill our most important relationships in 10 or 20 years.
How do we strike a balance, particularly when work itself can be so gratifying? People say, their intense schedule is the result of their desire to “make a difference in people’s lives, and they are good at it. That is very hard to give up and it keeps a lot of people happy.” True success means recognizing our real, individual priorities and, as best we can, living them out today instead of pinning our hopes on some mythical future state of “I’ll be happy when…”
Source: HBR blog
Source: HBR blog