SLO County News BlogGolf, Wine, Real Estate, Business & Travel NewsWorking Hard for the SLO LifeTuesday, October 12, 2004We in SLO, tout the wonders of the "SLO Life", a balanced life where work, play, family, community and service are equally valued and experienced. Our excellent year-round climate and lack of traffic enables much more time spent outdoors, than do most locales - and we take advantage of that. However, the cost of living in San Luis Obispo County is among the highest in the county, sometimes requiring that we work a little harder to maintain this SLO Life. But, is hard work an acceptable attribute of the SLO Life? Perhaps the SLO Life isn't or shouldn't be about balance, but about priorities. We can't balance "everything", but we can make it a priority to spend more time on "some things" - including working hard.This topic is a little off-subject for this blog, but in this field of web development and in the businesses of many of our clients, the pursuit of balance is often a challenge - or even "bunk" as described in an article I recently read in Fast Company. Below are some excerpts from, and link to, this article at Fast Company that describes why a balanced life is "bunk" and introduces the importance of priorities. The article contains some interesting perspectives on workaholics and outsourcing as well... Stewart Friedman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, and Sharon Lobel of Seattle University have a term for such folks: "happy workaholics." Friedman, who has long encouraged business leaders to pursue "whole" lives, thinks it's possible for leaders to be "poster children for balance," as he says. But he also agrees that conventional arguments for balance devalue the work half of the equation. "Work is an experience through which much of life's rewards and opportunities for service can be realized," he says. "Creating value for the world, for the next generation". The global economy is antibalance. For as much as Accenture and Google say they value an environment that allows workers balance, they're increasingly competing against companies that don't. You're competing against workers with a lot more to gain than you, who will work harder for less money to get the job done. This is the dark side of the "happy workaholic." Someday, all of us will have to become workaholics, happy or not, just to get by. Protest, if you like, against labor exploitation or unfair competition. The reality is, workers in India, China, Brazil, and, inevitably, everywhere else aren't stopping long to worry about it. They make our developed-world notion that workers actually are entitled to balance seem quaintly dated. For many, the great fallacy is not that we aspire to accomplishment but that we aspire to everything else, too. Unwilling to prioritize among things that all seem important, we instead invent for ourselves the possibility of having everything. Life is about setting priorities and making trade-offs; that's what grown-ups do. But in our all-or-nothing culture, resorting to those sorts of decisions is too often seen as a kind of failure. Seeking balance, we strive for achievement everywhere, all the time -- and we feel guilty and stressed out when, inevitably, we fall short. Balance, for what the word is worth, then becomes a lifelong quest -- balance among chapters rather than within each chapter. "It gets in people's heads that the ultimate goal is a 50-50 split between work and life," says work-life consultant Cali Williams Yost. "But there are times when I've happily devoted 80% of my time to work -- and other times when I couldn't." The tough part is recognizing the chapters for what they are -- just temporary episodes that together make up a coherent and satisfying whole. Those who succeed, says Zelman, are "the people who learn to dance with change, who create and ride the wave." They don't make decisions once or twice, but all the time. Balance is Bunk! - It's the central myth of the modern workplace: With a few compromises, you can have it all. But it's all wrong, and it's making us crazy. Here's how to have a life anyway. [fast company] Read More
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