There’s an awesome blog post here on Business Pundit by rob. It touches many important points about work and life (and business). The line between work life and personal life is a rather blurry one and I seriously doubt you can entirely separate both. You will probably spend most of your hours awake, working anyway. So rather than lie about it, just be honest and admit that ( work = life ) and ( life = work ).
Work sucks. It sucks because at its core it has become impure. Business used to be about providing value to the customer. Entrepreneurs captured a portion of that value creation as profit. The more value they created, the more profit they could make. But then along came Wall Street. Obsessed with quarterly profit increases and seeing them as disconnected from value creation, Wall Street encouraged businesses to think short-term. The things that led to value creation – things like innovation, continued learning, employee development, long-term focus – were replaced by pump-and-dump management styles. What can we do to hit the target next quarter regardless of the long term consequences? After all, we just want to pump this baby up and sell it off.
Google offers no guidance on its stock for investors. They definitely saw this coming. Some called Google arrogant. I say they’re in it for the long haul.
Once people gave up on the idea of greatness for business, work changed. Now most people are working out of necessity, not desire. Few companies provide good working environments, because employees have come to be viewed as expenses, not assets.
The irony of a job, is that although you get a job because you need money to obtain basic necessities, you should get a job because you absolutely love that job (you’re passionate and genuinely interested with what you do at work), and not because you just need to pay off your car loan, cell phone bills, etc.
A simple test is to ask if you view your job as a burden that you just need to get it over with (because of your bills) or do you look forward to Monday mornings to tackle that next milestone. I strongly believe that if you constantly strive to be better at what you are passionate about, the money will follow. (I know, that sounds similar to Google’s “build it first, figure out how to monetize later”, but I promise I didn’t copy).
Business is like a game, and like any other game, I hate to see people cheat. Nothing is more exciting than the ongoing battle for profit between two companies that are waging market wars using real tactics like innovation, productivity increases, better marketing, sounder strategy, solid business models, and flawless execution. It’s much more exciting than watching them win by lobbying the government for protection from competitors or pushing money around financial statements until it looks good.
It’s a shame that most businesses don’t compete the true capitalistic way. Even Google is guilty of that. The law provides too many ways for businesses to *cough* exploit *cough*, just to get ahead.