Balancing Modern Work-Life Challenges: From Workaholism to Personal Fulfillment
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Thanks for listening 🚀 - Mark Smith
Chapters
00:01 - Balancing Work and Personal Life
13:56 - Navigating Career, Family, and Boundaries
22:53 - Exploring Work-Life Balance Perceptions
28:50 - Exploring Personal Work-Life Integration
Transcript
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Welcome to the Ecosystem Show.
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We're thrilled to have you with us here.
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We challenge traditional mindsets and explore innovative approaches to maximizing the value of your software estate.
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We don't expect you to agree with everything.
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Challenge us, share your thoughts and let's grow together.
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Now let's dive in.
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It's showtime.
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Welcome back everybody.
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Can you believe it?
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Five of us are in the house.
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That's been a while since we've all been on board.
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We're all deeply interested in having a chat today, especially Chris.
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He's riveted to what we'll be covering.
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You notice he looks like the old banner.
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When he made us change the banner and he looked super serious and annoyed he looks like that in the opening sequence here.
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I don't know if you've seen that lately Chris has been mixing business and pleasure on his LinkedIn profile and he has a video there of him flexing at the gym with his PT and I decided to listen to this and they talked about Smith being a machine, which I had to comment on.
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I didn't even know there's a workout, a piece of equipment called a Smith machine.
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Is that right, it's called the Smith machine, but anyhow, I took it as thus.
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Smith is a machine and I'm like thank you for the compliment I see your PT's reached out to me, chris.
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This is your fault, man, this is your fault.
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I was like, like hey, there's another guy I can uh that I can on board here.
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Um, but anyhow, I'm excited that we're all together and, uh, I suppose I'm more excited because for me this these type of sessions always morning sessions, and for my friends here they're all evening sessions, so they're all pretty much, you know, uh, tapped out for the day, but they are eager to share their ideas and thoughts.
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So, anna, I'm gonna throw to you what's top of mind for you right now.
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Hi, hi everyone.
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Well, given that, as you mentioned, it is evening for us, it's actually 21 past eight in the evening in the UK and after this we have another hour meeting.
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So after we stop recording this podcast, I would like to talk about work-life balance.
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It's mainly because I am surrounded by workaholics.
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My husband, in particular, is one of them.
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I would say that 80% of our arguments are about how stressed out he can be because of work and how much that affects us in our day-to-day life.
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So what do you guys think?
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I do not get stressed out.
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Do not get stressed out, don't work at nine.
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With that in mind, if anybody has followed us for some time, you will see that all of us tend to be prolific in our online and offline worlds.
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Prolific in our online and offline worlds.
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Will I see you?
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you know from my external observation and never, talking to you personally I see that you're always.
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That's a feature, not a bug.
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I'm not quite sure for which one of you it's a feature, but it's definitely a feature for one of you well, it is a lie to start with um, because we do uh a converse from time to time and um, but yeah, you always seem to be at a festival, uh, at a party, having the most amazing life that I see all over Europe, might I add, or India for that matter as well always jet-setting somewhere.
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But I know that you're in this very senior role inside the organization you work for.
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You have a lot of folks that depend on your talent and how do you?
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judge them, I would say he, he depends on a lot of folks talents, that's the uh I just make the teas mark, that's that's what you do surround yourself by geniuses and make them tea, get them chocolate, feed them cake, keep them happy and that's it.
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And then you just what?
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So you're home by five each night and, uh, tucked up in bed by six exactly that.
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um, I mean, they're solid observations, and do you know what it's?
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I guess you're getting to that.
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How do you balance that point of view and I?
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I for the last.
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Well, ever since I started my professional career, I've been quite relentlessly pursuing the next thing, the next thing, and studying and studying, and I think Chris and I always used to joke and say insecure overachievers, like we never felt good enough.
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So you're always in more and more and more and more hours, and that's affected me quite a lot in relationships, in social time with friends, in time with family members that have passed away, and I've always really, quite deeply regretted that.
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And so I said about six months ago, I'm going to start saying yes to more things socially, but I'm also going to try and say yes to more things at work that have a good outcome, that have an epic meaning behind them, either mentorship or working more with larger groups of people.
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So with that, I have gone to more festivals.
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I've never been to a festival before in my life before, and in this year I went to some of the biggest ones in the world and I absolutely loved it.
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I'm glad I started saying yes and then, you know, making more time to hang with friends and family have actually gone downhill because I started hanging out with the girlfriend more and not balancing the the friends and family side.
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So now that slips and then you start focusing too much on work and the rest slips out.
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So it's a really hard balance and I think this is a really interesting topic that I get asked on a lot.
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I will give some more sort of tips as we go on, but I think you know to sort of revert back to your original statement there.
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Yes, I've been a busy boy does it does?
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does anybody have boundaries, like as in that you've kind of created boundaries around your schedule, um, and how you kind of do compartmentalize how do you, how does it work?
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yeah, I have.
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I'm, I'm brutal.
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Actually, the thing that's important I block my calendar.
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I actually make my calendar open to every single person that I work with, across every organization, and I block it and I actually tell them this is when I sleep, this is when I go to gym, this is when I feed my children and I've had people do this to me before with their scheduled time and when I'm eating dinner.
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I'm like, absolutely, I'll take the call, let me show you what it feels like.
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And I take the call and they're dealing with kids and food and shit everywhere, and I'm like you know what?
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This is your own fucking fault, yo.
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So it's the truth, right?
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I'm like, if this is what you want to do, if you can't respect my time, then let me show you exactly how being disrespectful feels.
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And I do that, so I do something similar, I do something similar, and for me, it's that I steer, I block.
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I have a rule right, which is that I try to stick to no more than three or four hours a day in meetings or calls and I try to steer those into the what's everyone laughing at.
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Because your wife's looking at you like like you're fucking crap.
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As you're talking, I was watching Anna's face to see whether she believed what you were saying.
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Let's not turn this into a debate.
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I'll show you my calendar no no, just carry on.
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It's great between North America and Europe, particularly North American Eastern time, and then you know either UK time or Central European time, and for me this originally started off as not a way to control my calendar and set boundaries.
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It started off as a way for me to be able to hop across the sea pretty regularly and not have to rebook every all of my standing meetings.
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But I did have an experience a while back that I worked at a you know I'm sure many of us have had this experience.
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I worked at a company I'm not going to say who it is, you can look at my LinkedIn profile and guess, but it's anyone's guess, right?
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I worked at a company that just had a horrendous culture of respect for other people's schedule and calendars and in fact, this company had they actually had a policy that everyone's calendar was supposed to be open so that anyone else could read it, and I turned it off.
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And I was spoken to about this, despite being in a senior role.
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I actually you know it's like someone spoke to me about this.
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I said you have two choices you can fire me or you can let me have a closed calendar.
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And the reason was because this particular organization there was just this sort of culture of other people thinking that they were the arbiters of what was most important on your schedule, right, of what was most important on your schedule, right, so so-and-so.
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If he wanted to book over something that he thought, because he thought his thing was more important than the thing that you had booked, and my reasoning on this is that you don't have that right.
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It needs to be enough for you to know that I am busy at this time, end of story.
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And that was where I think my boundary setting around calendars actually, um, actually came in, despite the fact that Anna doesn't think that I have any, but, um, I, I do, in fact.
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I do, in fact, work hard at this.
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Yeah, I think you work harder ever since, um, ever since the accident.
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But I do think you're sleeping back in because the biggest challenge that I guess you, you know, you guys have, we all have.
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But in this perspective, people just assume that because I'm a mom, I need my time.
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So I do find that people are much more respectful to my calendar than I think they would be to Andrew's calendar and I assume Chris's calendars and yours, mark, and yours will, just because they assume that you can just take a call in between, like two sessions of Peloton and like writing a proposal and whatever.
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That's interesting.
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This is where you know the other side of the coin.
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Actually can I see it a lot Because we work together, right?
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Andrew and I work together, andrew and Chris and Mark and I we all work together.
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Andrew has a busy day.
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He's got an important job of keeping his own company alive, right?
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Everybody wants him, obviously.
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So I do feel that the boundary setting of three hours per day is sleeping because there's just so much demand.
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So I would be super curious.
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I also think that you don't sleep, mark, because I see Mark is insane.
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Emails from you, you know, morning, noon and night.
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And yeah, I would hate for you guys to get seriously ill or, you know, to not be able to focus or burn out.
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I think it is easier for me to establish a work-life balance.
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That's such an interesting observation and I hadn't seen or thought about that before that people potentially avoid because they know you have a family and looking after kids.
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How many times when you have been invited to speak at a conference and let's just say it was a virtual conference and your speaking slot was at I don't know eight, nine, 10 o'clock, seven o'clock, whatever how many times did somebody ask you whether that interferes with your kid's bedtime?
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Because I do get that question asked.
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Yeah, I never get it and then.
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I often get the, the, the situation where I will have to end a call on time because I said I've got to take my kids to daycare or I've got to feed my kids or I've got to, and there's definitely the oh, do you?
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You know, it's almost like isn't somebody else doing that?
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Like, yeah, what do you do?
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you do that as well and my friends are surprised, like all of my friends are telling me oh, you should slow down, you should really slow down.
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You shouldn't be like that stressed out when we were working together.
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Will will always be like I'm really worried about you, I think you're doing too much and that's like that's and that's you know really nice, and I still burn out sometimes.
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But I'm wondering how many times do men in our industry get given the same courtesy?
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it's really interesting.
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And, anna, actually you made me reflect on something that you said to me that I found really quite profound.
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So I, I agree, I, I, you know, I, I think we're probably all guilty.
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It's slightly, it's slightly systemic in regards to the old ways of thinking.
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But I remember and you get this a lot where, especially, and once again, only towards women, most of the time, which is once you have a family and they see your work and their career, they go, oh, you're having it all.
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And I remember I once said that to you and I have you to me.
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I went, annie, you're having it all.
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And you said, well, no, I'm not, it's impossible to have it all, but I'm trying to get as much of it as I can.
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And I really liked that, such a nice way of looking at it.
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Do you know what I've I've seen and, by the way, this is this.
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Thank you, anna.
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This was an unexpected turn from what I like, kind of the ho-hum.
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Let's all talk about how we manage our calendars.
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So this, I think, is really good.
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But I've observed at several points throughout my career the hostility maybe not always hostility, but sort of the least supportive people of parents, particularly of mothers with young children.
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Have been several, and I can think of specific examples, several female colleagues that I've had who did not have children or families.
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And, you know, in several cases several actually confided in me and said you know, it really frustrates me that so-and-so gets to come into the office later, all because they have kids, as if the rest of us don't have things to be doing.
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And I think at the time these conversations were happening, before I had, you know, before I had a child, I just sort of didn't care, right, it was sort of like you know, girl, there are way bigger things to worry about than resenting your colleagues who are mothers.
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But now, as I think back on it, I'm actually enraged, I feel sort of this fury at these, you know, at folks who basically I've seen take the position.
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Oh, everyone is so nice to so and so because she's a mom and she can get away with anything, and like thinking back on that now I haven't thought about this in years.
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It really sort of infuriates me.
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But that's poisonous.
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And, as we are talking about work life balance in a group that clearly I mean I don't know, maybe I should just speak to myself in a group that I believe doesn't have any work life balance right now, because things are moving, are just moving too fast and you need to like hustle, want to associate yourself with parents and and vice versa.
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Thinking that, uh, people who, who don't have kids, are not married, don't have a family, whatever, um can work more would annihilate those folks from your organization as well.
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Right, because they're gonna be like what the hell?
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also, I see a scenario where a lot of people their work is their life, yep, in other words, I've noticed that some people actually, uh, would struggle to live with themselves, and what I mean by that is free time for them is something they don't like.
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They live to work, not work to live, yeah, yeah.
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And so for them, like for me, I couldn't think of something more amazing than be dropped on a desert island with no tech and nobody for a week.
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Like you're sort of non-corporeal nobody.
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That would be bliss right for me, because for me I'd be like I would get this uninterrupted time just to think.
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And if you look at the way a whole society is run, it's really designed for us not to think, to be bombarded with messaging and stuff that says go, do and think on your behalf.
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A lot of people are buzzing like.
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One of the measures for me is when I look at my career and I can look at years that I can't find any distinctly thing that pops out of those years.
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In other words, one year blended into the next, one project blended into the next, and it was just the same thing different year, nothing that kind of stands out.
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And some people they don't want to spend time by themselves or don't have a life outside of their work If they don't have children, family, other things that are coming at them, and so therefore it is easy to get caught into that and then wonder why other people do have these other things.
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You know, going on that's.
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I mean, how many people like I saw a stat come out of the uk recently around retirement and how in the 70s the average retirement or pull on the pension in the uk was something like either 25 or 35 years, so in other words, from somebody starting to collect their pension, they collected it for all those years before they left this earth.
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Right, the average time now in the uk is eight years yeah, but one thing that's interesting about that is a lot of people start out wanting to work to enable life.
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You know they, they, they get a good job.
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They want to get a bigger job with more money, bigger house.
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You know the classic, you know economic throughput.
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But then you get incremental life absorption, so a bit like saying I'm gonna stay out for another drink one more hour won't hurt, that's one more hour of happiness you borrowed from tomorrow.
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We call it a hangover.
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Now the difference there is you get incremental life absorption as well, where you'll say, okay, I'm gonna work a little bit harder and then you start eating into your hobby time, but that's okay, because you're going to give me a head on your project and that becomes a pattern.
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Then you drop the hobby, you drop the family dinner, you and you suddenly you're, you accidentally come into a workaholic.
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I would like to move on to a topic about.
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You know we're seeing this a lot in the community, but I'll come back to that.
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So tell'm going to tell Andrew's poise to say something.
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I was just going to pick up on something that Mark said, and there's a few different threads to weave together here.
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So one of the things that the topics that I've been interested in through the years has been this idea that over the course of history, and in actually very recent times it's a very recent historical development that wealthier, better off people work.
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These outrageous excuse me, these outrageously long days, these outrageously long weeks, right For most of human history, affluence produced leisure time, and if you don't believe me, go watch Downton Abbey, anna, and I have just finished rewatching it all.
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Right, like you wonder what were those people doing all day right?
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They were changing.
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Obviously they were changing clothes, they were changing their outfits and they were having tea, right.
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What else is there Exactly, right?
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So what else is it?
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But this is this is a fairly recent development in human history, where affluence now does not necessarily, and in fact in many cases does not equal, equal more leisure time.
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And you know and I'm no sociologist, I don't, this is not something I study, but I do find it interesting.
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I've wondered if part of that phenomenon isn't something to do with the convergence of tools, right, in that work, so much of work and so much of leisure now happens using the same set of devices, right?
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So?
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Which then sort of raises another question, and that's the difference between work and what I will call because for lack of a better word industriousness.
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And here's what I mean by that.
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For a very long time in my life I just referred to the long blocks of time sometimes 16 hours a day, right, that, especially when I was writing books, that that I would spend with a laptop or with an iPad, I preferred to write books on my iPad, right, and I just sort of called all of it work, right, but for me, writing fiction was, was very.
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Not that work wasn't enjoyable, but writing fiction was.
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I guess it wasn't work, but it looked a lot like work and that's why I'm calling it industriousness, because I was still sitting at the same device doing something that looked a lot like work, even though for me, I, I, you know writing fiction, writing novels, was you know is is extraordinarily.
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It's good for my soul, I enjoy it, I love doing it.
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I think that's a good point, because the fact that work blends into personal life, because, uh, to give you an example, yeah, tomorrow we've got a dinner.
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Example, yeah tomorrow we've got a dinner it's a friend's dinner.
00:22:41.755 --> 00:22:42.257
I'm looking forward to it.
00:22:42.257 --> 00:22:42.618
That's always.
00:22:42.618 --> 00:22:44.044
We're bringing our daughter to this dinner.
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We don't have child care in the uk, like, unless we sell her, there's nothing right.
00:22:49.340 --> 00:22:56.378
We need to bring this child with us I don't know if that counts as child care, I can't.
00:22:56.479 --> 00:22:58.564
The circus would probably be interested.
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To the circus.
00:23:00.232 --> 00:23:03.141
I mean because she's like really good at singing songs.
00:23:03.141 --> 00:23:05.057
She does a bit of gymnastics anyway.
00:23:05.609 --> 00:23:09.721
Well, and actually lately has been very into pretending to be a monkey.
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So I mean all the signs.
00:23:12.459 --> 00:23:12.720
Right.
00:23:12.720 --> 00:23:18.634
But Andrew's like oh, I think we're going to have to talk a lot about AI, we should get childcare Flag.
00:23:18.634 --> 00:23:21.190
Oh, I think we're going to have to talk a lot about AI, we should get childcare Flag, flag, flag.
00:23:21.851 --> 00:23:23.036
Andrew did not say that.
00:23:23.036 --> 00:23:25.051
Christopher said that, because raise your hand.
00:23:25.051 --> 00:23:28.397
If you're going to this dinner, Raise your hand To be fair.
00:23:28.417 --> 00:23:28.538
Okay.
00:23:31.630 --> 00:23:32.993
Somebody mentioned.
00:23:33.054 --> 00:23:35.861
No in line, don't worry, I'll dial you in.
00:23:37.602 --> 00:23:49.906
Somebody mentioned that during this dinner we may talk a lot about work and therefore we would disrupt the dynamic of the group because people want to talk about these subjects.
00:23:49.906 --> 00:23:59.544
We're going to be running around after our child and I'm like I've been looking forward to this dinner for like the last two weeks or so.
00:23:59.544 --> 00:24:08.540
Can I just go and have an overpriced curry and a cocktail, Like, can this just be like a nice dinner?
00:24:08.540 --> 00:24:10.316
And so, yeah, you're right.
00:24:10.316 --> 00:24:27.923
I feel like, even if we're setting up, like you know, a very pleasurable thing, meeting up with your friends If your friends are entrepreneurs or from your industry or you end up still doing work.
00:24:27.923 --> 00:24:37.715
So again, disrupting that work-life balance and is that healthy I'm just wondering Is work-life balance a myth?
00:24:38.357 --> 00:24:39.200
Is it a modern term?
00:24:39.220 --> 00:24:40.113
Yeah, is it still a?
00:24:40.113 --> 00:24:40.454
Thing?
00:24:40.776 --> 00:24:53.825
Right, I just saw a guy say on X the other day and he was just like when you hire people to our company, we make it crystal clear that we'll be working 10-hour days and we'll probably work on Saturdays and Sundays as well.
00:24:53.825 --> 00:24:55.125
Are you up for that?
00:24:55.125 --> 00:24:56.992
This is the way this company is going to go.
00:24:56.992 --> 00:25:03.338
And if you look at any big companies that have grinded at the start they did crazy, ridiculous hours.
00:25:03.338 --> 00:25:05.478
They didn't have work-life balance.
00:25:06.450 --> 00:25:26.781
The richest man in the world I would have probably a lot of people agree with me probably doesn't have a work-life balance, right, yeah, and you know my wife doesn't like him because she was like and you know my wife doesn't like him because she was like imagine his kids how they must have to live with the leftovers of his work.
00:25:26.781 --> 00:25:34.083
You know time-wise and but I'm like, is work-life balance just a modern concept?
00:25:34.083 --> 00:25:38.980
Because if you go back 150 years, when the sun came up, you worked.
00:25:38.980 --> 00:25:48.823
When the sun went down you stopped working and you were in bed pretty soon after that, but you would be out physically working.
00:25:48.823 --> 00:25:58.380
We just have an electronic world that we work with a lot more and, as Andrew said, the device blend of work and activity has kind of overlapped so much.
00:25:59.170 --> 00:26:00.493
I think, the work-life balance.
00:26:00.493 --> 00:26:07.582
First of all, I find it to be an off-putting phrase, but that's because I think that it is frequently misused and misunderstood.
00:26:07.582 --> 00:26:22.221
But one of the ways that I think we collectively misunderstand work-life balance is that we often think about it in terms of the calendar, right, or the hours in a day that we work.
00:26:22.221 --> 00:26:27.318
Look at where we went as this discussion, as this topic, began to unfold.
00:26:27.318 --> 00:26:41.103
But one of the ways I think that we would be well served to realize that work-life balance is going to play out in different ways for different people.
00:26:41.103 --> 00:26:55.891
And one of the ways that I think that it plays out, which I thought, I thought that we were over this as a society, at least in occupations that don't require physical, that don't always require physical presence.
00:26:55.891 --> 00:27:02.330
So clearly, you know, for a lot of teachers and physicians and you know, et cetera, et cetera.
00:27:02.330 --> 00:27:06.842
There there's there's delivery, amazon delivery, drivers, right, there's a lot.
00:27:06.842 --> 00:27:12.522
You know there's a need for to be in a specific physical place, and I thought we were over this.
00:27:13.210 --> 00:27:40.153
But what I've seen over the last year is this idea of you know this, this return to office nonsense and the, the, you know, employers again starting to be being more and more assertive about caring where, where people are physically, and and I, like I said, I thought we were over this and it drives me crazy.
00:27:40.153 --> 00:27:54.900
And you know, listen, some of the some of the world's most successful companies, across multiple industries, are now increasing these return to office mandates.
00:27:54.900 --> 00:27:56.123
I think they're nuts, but I do think.
00:27:56.123 --> 00:28:01.375
I do think that work life balance can play out in different ways for different people, play out in different ways for different people.
00:28:01.375 --> 00:28:02.356
It's not always about the calendar.
00:28:02.356 --> 00:28:15.818
Part of it is about one allowing people to be in places and with people that they care about, but also, frankly, allowing people to be in places where they are able to do their best work, and for some people that's an office and for some people it isn't.
00:28:16.541 --> 00:28:21.873
So I absolutely agree and it's the bit I wanted to comment on, which is I believe it's the bit I wanted to comment on, which is I, I, I believe it's.
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It's the.
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