Achieving Work-Life Harmony: Energizing Both Spheres for Success (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: How do you go about establishing that work-life balance that everybody, you know, talks about and thinks about? You've got, I mean, you live a big life, right? And how do you balance it? I get this question a lot. I get it. I teach senior executive kind of leadership classes at Amazon for our most senior execs. And I also teach or not teach, but I also speak to interns. So kind of all across the spectrum. And I get this question about work-life balance all the time from both ends of the spectrum. And my view is I don't even like the phrase work-life balance. I think it's misleading. I like the phrase work-life harmony because I know that if I am energized at work, happy at work, feeling like I'm adding value, part of a team, whatever energizes you, that makes me better at home. It makes me a better husband, a better father. And likewise, if I'm happy at home, it makes me a better employee, a better boss, all the things. It's not about, it's not primarily about, there may be crunch periods where it's about the number of hours in the week. But that's not the real thing. Usually it's about, do you have energy? And is your work depriving you of energy or is your work generating energy for you? And you know, there are people, everybody in this room knows people who fall into these two camps. You're in a meeting and the person comes in the room. Some people come into the meeting and they add energy to the meeting. Other people come into the meeting and the whole meeting just deflates. And those people just, they drain energy from the meeting. And you have to decide which of those kinds of people you're going to be. Are you going to add energy? And the same thing at home. And the same thing at home. And so it's a wheel, it's a cycle, it's a flywheel, it's a circle, it's not a balance. Because a balance, that's why that metaphor is so dangerous, because it implies there's a strict trade-off. And you could be out of work, have all the time for your family in the world, but really depressed and demoralized about your work situation. And your family wouldn't want to be anywhere near you. They would wish you would take a vacation from them. And so it's not about the number of hours, not primarily. I suppose if you went crazy with, you know, 100 hours a week or something, yeah, maybe there are limits. I've never had a problem, and I think it's because both sides of my life give me energy. And that's what I would recommend, that's what I do recommend to interns and execs. Thank you.