What is your greatest passion…the one thing that drives you to get up in the morning and push harder and harder?
This is my greatest passion…my little rose!
Now I talk about my business passion: finding and telling great stories. yes…it is. But that is just one part of the bigger picture.
This little one makes me work harder, work smarter, and challenge myself to seek the balance in the work/life continuum.
A few months ago, I sat on a panel discussion where the audience were mothers of preschoolers (MOPS). They called it the man panel and the major part of the discussion was balancing work and home. I think there is a bigger balance for self-employed, small business, entrepreneurial individuals.
Each day, we balance so many pieces of this work/life pie:
- home (keeping the house running – the honey do’s)
- partner in life (keeping the one we love the most close)
- family (keeping our loved ones close to feel like family)
- children (being a good father with a profound presence)
- working in our business (executing the daily tasks to generate revenue)
- working on our business (planning and preparing for tomorrow)
- growing our business (thinking and preparing for opportunities beyond)
- keeping the focus on our passions (defining those passions in personal and business life)
- finding time for ourselves (time to recharge those batteries)
Now look at that list and you think, we can combine some of these points into categories, but i specifically left them separated. Each of these have become so important and it has even taken me years to bring language to all of those points. What do I mean? It is being able to have the wisdom to actually write each point down and recognize each of their relative importances.
I read a wonderful blog in the Harvard Business Review, here is an interesting quote:
“…according to one survey, 75 percent of male executives are married to homemakers. It’s simply not possible to work 90 hours a week and see to your own basic needs – much less support someone else’s career. It works the other way, too: with only one salary to rely on, those husbands need all the wage premium they can get.”
It goes on to share this…
“Millennial men are beginning to do what women have done for decades: to work as consultants or start their own businesses that give them the flexibility for better work-family balance. A forthcoming study of New Models of Legal Practice by the Center for WorkLife Law documents lawyers in their prime who left large, prestigious law firms so they could practice law in ways that allow them to be more involved in children’s lives.”
Now I am a Gen X…so I miss this point by a few years. But…I can definitely relate. Sometimes I fell like I am a millennial. I did what all Gen X’s do. I attended a four year school and received a degree, got a job, and started working my way up the corporate ladder. BUT, a few years into my career…I realized that I was working too damn hard and not making enough money. Also…there was a cap on my long term opportunities.
So I started over…went back to graduate school to get a focused education. I was re-emerging in the business world in a post 911 era. A time when entrepreneurship was becoming common place in the tech world.
Realizing this path…working for myself, learning to start a family, and grow a business; the list above started emerging point by point.
This takes me back to my passion…my ultimate focus. Rose and Sarah are my passion and all things are wrapped around their lives sarah and the life we are building together.
