I just read a great post on work life balance on the Savings and Sangria blog. And while I was reading it a thought occurred to me about the whole concept of balancing your career with the rest of your life. What struck me was that almost every blogger, including me, feels it is critically important that you don’t invest yourself into your work to the point that the rest of your life suffers. Life is made up of a whole lot of pieces beside work. Your health, spirituality, friends, spouse, kids, parents, hobbies, volunteering, giving, education, self-improvement and probably a dozen more things all make up how you spend your time and energy and generally are not directly part of your job. They matter too!
We all agree that it is not a healthy choice to devote so much of your focus to work that your availability to the rest of your life is lacking. We all want to have a well rounded life. Then why do we reward people with terrible work life balance with the highest pay and honors?
Maybe you disagree, surely we do not give all the best to people that neglect family and friends to single mindedly pursue one goal? But we do! Let me see if I can convince you with the facts. Exhibit one is the elite of the elite in the business world, the Fortune 500 Chief Executive Officer, the CEO. I happened to work for one of those and have met quite a few others, but I’ll use survey data to make my point. The average work day for a CEO of a large corporation is about 10 to 11 hours on week days. Plus, they work another 8 to 10 hours, or more, on weekends. My CEO used to text and email me at 2AM on weekends! They live on corporate jets and much of that travel time is in addition to the crazy work hours I just listed. Many CEO’s get by on 4 to 6 hours of nightly sleep. That much time spent working does not lend itself to having a great family life, attending your kids’ soccer games or parent teacher conferences. You don’t get to play enough golf to stay good at it and you eat way too much comfort food. I wasn’t quite at that level but I remember being out of town 240 days in one year.
How do we reward these one-sided career fanatics? Well, average pay for a Fortune 500 CEO is $12.3 million. My poor CEO only got $6 million a year but the averages are pulled up by the really big corporations and we were only a middle of the pack Fortune 500 member. In exchange for owning most of their waking hours the board of directors grant them millions and millions of dollars. If they were only making $30,000 a year, we would consider them fools, chumps and losers for trading their entire life for money. Yet they are envied and the fight at the top of the corporate pyramid for that prized position is almost medieval in its brutality.
But that is business, it is Wall Street, what could you expect from that cold hearted neighborhood? Let’s look at something way more fun, sports. People playing games, it must be more rational and less serious, right? Exhibit two is the power five US college football coach. And if I have any global readers, I mean football with a ball that isn’t round. I live in SEC territory, and football is as big here as it is anywhere in the country. And what do we pay a college football coach in this neck of the woods? In 2020, a lower paid year for many coaches, due to Covid, the SEC head coaches’ pay ranged from a low of $3 million to a high of $9 million per year. The average was around $6 million a year. The same astronomical sum that my CEO made.
That is a ton of money for running an amateur sports program, I’m sure we’d all agree. In a sport where we don’t even pay the players, though that is coming, the coach makes more money in a single year than most of us will make in a lifetime. What is the typical life of a coach like? Unbelievably, coaches have an even worse work life balance than corporate CEO’s! Surveys of these coaches show that they work an amazing 14.28 hours a day, seven days a week! That’s during the football season but the fact is the season never really ends because recruiting, fund raising and other football activities go on year round. Can you imagine a life that has week after week of 14 plus hour days? Just how much balance is in that kind of life? No balance, zilch, not happening. Yet we idolize these people. Nick Saban is at least on the level of a demigod in Alabama. If you aren’t a football fan, Nick’s Alabama team habitually wins the national college football championship. And while he is 69 years old he has not announced any plans to retire.
Maybe it is better in the public sector. How about professional politicians, people like presidents and senators? Elected congressmen and women work around 70 hours a week when they are in session and about 60 hours when they aren’t. And when they aren’t working, they are fund raising. Those hours do not include travel time to all those fund raisers or the occasional junket. I was a lobbyist for about seven years and worked with a number of congress members. They basically commuted to DC from their home state and when in session, they did not see their families much. Ironically in their case the pay isn’t in the millions. Most senators and representatives make around $174,000 with leadership making a little over $200,000. That isn’t even close to coach or CEO money. You could argue that the contacts and networks that these elected officials garner are pretty much a lifetime income source and you might be right. Certainly, the other benefits they get are generous but they aren’t making bank like Nick Saban.
This elevation of maniacal workaholics is not a recent phenomenon. I think you’ll find that throughout history those who are held up as giants generally became great because they focused on a single goal with such intensity that their lives lacked balance in other areas. Thomas Edison had to nap during the day because he never made time in his life for a full night’s sleep. Yet our lives are immeasurably better for his inventions. He tried 10,000 possible materials for his incandescent light bulb filament before finding one that worked. The fact is that most people that are held up as great, whether they were scientists, generals or artists, devoted most of their waking hours to work. And that means they usually did not have the kind of work life balance that we feel is a prerequisite to having a full life.
I’d maintain that becoming a world class elite at anything almost prevents you from having a balanced life and that if you choose balance, you probably will not maximize your career. I know I did not maximize mine because I was not willing to pay that high a price. You can still be very good and rise pretty high, I was and I did. But you won’t be as good as someone who sells out completely and neglects other aspects of their life, like my CEO. Yet, where would we be without people who were willing to give everything they had to achieve one single minded goal, even if it came at a great cost to their families and other relationships?
What do you think, does Dabo Swinney have a full life, did Steve Jobs? Does Joe Biden? Did Mother Theresa?
Is having a commitment to having a well rounded life going to exclude you from the ranks of greatness or can you have it all?
Great (and sad) post. Not worth it. I, like you, prioritized balance, though I did rise to a Global Management position. It was high enough for me, and allowed a comfortable life and an earlier than normal retirement. It’s healthy to know when “enough is enough”.
Thanks Fritz, I had my sites set on running the plant when I was first hired and after that I got promoted again but it was less and less fun as time went on. I realized pretty quickly I did not want my bosses job and even in retirement I’ve turned down a pretty huge (to me) offer to go back to my bosses job at a competitor. But I do wonder whether a lot of the world’s progress is owed to people who took the devil’s bargain that you and I did not?
I enjoyed this one.
Some other examples I commonly see are management consultants, where the peons routinely do 10-12 hour days and the partners seem to do all that and more.
The days of climbing the greasy pole to then enjoy life on the golf course networking and rainmaking are long gone, if they were ever more than an urban myth!
That’s a good example, I would guess there are fanatically committed people in almost every field. And maybe they really do enjoy that life, think it is a decent trade. I remember my CEO showing me a selfie of himself sitting with a true superstar singer/actress. One of the one word name ones that hundreds of millions of people would recognize. And when I watched him ring the bell to end the trading session at Wall Street he was giddy. It is hard to know if that’s a full life or not, it would not be for me.
i’ll take the balance any day. i chose it but then again never landed in paid work that really had me “inspired.” if you ask me there are many people who complain about work/life balance that could free up more valuable time by committing to less on their plates. for my money the typical suburban family life is inflated with unnecessary activities that “everyone else does.” i’m glad we never had kids in our house and faced the pressure of carting them around to 100 activities that filled up all the free time with empty calories.
We had three kids but they didn’t do much in the way of extracurricular events. They were pretty big homebodies and so we didn’t have all those pressures to cart them around. We had a lot of family time together. They all made successful exits into the world in spite of not being cheerleaders or the star quarterback. I had a busy job but zero commute time so I never felt stretched too thin.
In a way, it’s comforting to know that the people who are earning the top salaries in their respective fields are absolutely grinding for it, and in many cases working harder than the rest of us. At the same time, it’s sad that this is the reality of the situation, and that we (as a society) aspire to this position. I played the game and kept climbing until a point somewhere in my early 30s where my travel had reached roughly 25-30% and my personal relationships were beginning to suffer. I’m glad that I pulled back before my kids were born; I’ll never sacrifice time with them in order to earn a few more bucks.
Adam, that’s a real credit to you. Ten years after you leave a company nobody there will even know you existed but your kids will know what kind of parent you were.
I’ve never aspired to earn millions (or even many hundreds of thousands of dollars) but hand over my life to my job in exchange. However, I don’t begrudge anyone else their own choices. And the stockholder part of me is awfully glad that those always-on workaholics exist.;-)
That’s a great point FI. I considered my career accomplishments to have been a big deal to me, no different from fitness goals or family ones. And I was fortunate to have the time to cover all the important fronts. Some people are one dimensional toward work and enjoy life that way. We can’t really judge that, it is their choice.
For these Johns Galts of the world ( who are very few in numbers) their job is their life. They won’t have it any other way. And yes, they will be sending people to Mars, inventing wireless way of transmitting electricity etc.
Work/life balance notion is for the rest of us and alas, although we can be quite comfortable in FIRE, no one outside of our family and friends will ever know our names.
Sergey, you said it better than I did!
I certainly think there are ways for people to make millions of dollars while working 10 – 25 hours a week. The answer is having billions of dollars all invested into the stock market!
However, for the very very vast majority, I believe it is a sad reality that you have to put in 80 – 100+ hours a week in order to make millions per year. I am not going to live that life for the rest of my life. Life is meant to be enjoyed, not to be squandered working.
David, that matches my experience. I think I pretty much hit the sweet spot of making pretty good money without crazy hours all the time. But I got very lucky to have it happen that way. Most people who had my job were in the 80 hour crowd. I just was not interested in that.
What great perspective. We’re all different, and I won’t begrudge the people who really feel called to single-mindedly pursue one goal, but I agree that you can’t have it all if you do. I’ve always kind of used this kind of thing as my yardstick for whether I’m being asked to work too hard in any job — if you expect me to work long hours and weekends, you better pay me the really big bucks or I’ll find something else. It’s getting hard though as we move up and do well in our jobs, especially for my husband. The hours and travel are getting relentless, and although he makes what most people would consider good money, it’s nowhere near the kind of money you’re talking about, which makes it really REALLY not worth it in my book. I’d rather have less money any day, as long as I have the time to enjoy the simple things in life, pursue things I enjoy, and spend the precious time I have with people I care about. But to each his own.
Thanks Mrs. FCB, always love your insights, because they are insightful! It is true that the higher you go the more hours are expected. But even at that it seems to make some people happy though it is hard to know whether to envy or pity them.
I agree that those high paying positions come at a personal cost and there are some who have the drive and focus to go full speed ahead. I like a little balance and time to enjoy my life. It’s wonderful to have choices. Thanks for a wonderfully, insightful read.
Thanks goatdog! I think the majority of people are in your camp, although almost all of us would love to have the massive pay without the massive demands!
I agree with you Steveark. Corporate America rewards the workaholics. I have a topic similar to this in my queue some day to tackle. But as a society, for whatever reason, we still value those who make the big bucks more than flexibility. I think the reasons can differ for different workaholics – some love the work, some value the money, some are trapped, some think this is what they should be doing and don’t know any better.
I also think there’s outliers that can have greatness with some flexibility, although very rare – but those are more do to luck or unique circumstances. If you want to achieve greatness, then there will have to be some serious sacrifice. How a person addresses that is up to them.
But like you, I value the balance. Earlier in my career I was a workaholic. Now I value flexibility more than a big pay day or advancing. I still work some heavy hours but that’s to hopefully enable an early exit from the grind. Gotta pay a price to buy your freedom… haha.
Q-Fi, well said. Like Freddy Smidlap you said it better than I did. There is a disconnect in how people elevate and almost worship the ultra successful corporate, sports or political stars of this world when the fact is most of them totally lack balance or they simply could not have paid the price to be where they are. We all imagine what being Michael Jordan or Tom Brady must be like, but we don’t envy the millions of practice hours or the concussions and injuries they suffered to be an elite g.o.a.t. But at the same time the world needed Elon Musk and Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, even if you and I might not enjoy living their lives.
I always said that if I could pack a 80,000 into a stadium I would be paid more.
Indeed Dividend Power. Its just hard to be that person who has star power in entertainment or sports. There is so much of that kind of talent, it will always be oversupplied.
Way cool!