Above all else, prioritize “quality
time” with your family! Nothing will count more in the evening of your Life
than the memories you have of the time you spent with your family – especially
with your spouse and children.
I read a very interesting, heart-warming syndicated
story in today’s Times of India. It
talked about how a high-profile, globe-trotting finance executive, Mohamed
El-Erian, 56, quit his $100m++ job at the California-based PIMCO Investment
Fund last year because his daughter complained that he had never been with her
for what she thought were important events in her Life. The list of 22 events
El-Erian missed included the child’s first day at school, her first football
match and a Halloween parade. El-Erian told The
Independent’s Cahal Milmo: “I felt awful and got defensive. I had a good
excuse for each missed event! Travel, important meetings, an urgent phone call,
sudden to-dos. But it dawned on me that I was missing an infinitely more
important point. As much as I could rationalize it ... my work-Life
balance had gotten way out of whack, and the imbalance was hurting my
relationship with my daughter. I was not making nearly enough time for her.”
Well, El-Erian was lucky that he heard the
“wake up call” and actually “woke up”. There are many, many, many people out
there who are too busy building their businesses and their careers at the cost
of their families.
I too “woke up” to a “wake up call”. But I
woke up only on the day that my son, then 18, took a flight out to Chicago, to
join undergrad school. Until that day, back in September 2008, I too, like
El-Erian was obsessed with work. The business came first. And business came
second. Family, if at all, was treated by me as something that I had to merely “provide”
for. But that day, at Chennai International Airport, when my son bid goodbye to
all of us, who had gone with him to see him off, and took the escalator to the
departure gates, it suddenly dawned on me that we were not just sending him to
college, we were actually letting him be independent in this big, huge world.
The bird had flown from the nest. That night when I fixed myself a drink and
sat thinking of my son, I realized from here on…he would graduate, get himself
a job, raise a family and be pretty much on his own. It struck me that he would
never be home the way he had been with us for the past 18 years. And it dawned
on me then that I had missed much of those 18 years – in fact, I had missed
watching him grow. It wasn’t as if I was a reckless and irresponsible father.
My son and I always bonded well – and we still are great friends. But that
night I felt I could have done better being with him for some more of his
birthdays and several more of his events in school and in his theatre group.
My awakening led me to conclude that it is only
because we crave and “search” for work-Life balance that we never really find
it. I have realized that we have to stop seeing work as different from Life.
The truth is that there is just one Life that we all have. And our family is an
important part of that Life. As important as work – as in a professional career
or a business – is. We cannot claim that we are toiling for the family and kid
ourselves that sometime, when we have saved enough for the family, we will
enjoy, or invest in, quality time with them. It is because we kid ourselves
with this flawed logic that we don’t ever find work-Life balance. Actually, living
a well-balanced Life is indeed possible. What is required is that we define for
ourselves what’s most important to us in Life. And invest our waking hours
prudently among these few areas. It is important that we write for ourselves a
list of “never miss” family events – which includes two week-long vacations
annually – and stick to fulfilling this list at any cost. On an average,
including vacation time, you may require 30 days of family time a year. Of
course, this is doable. Especially if you consider the 80~100 work weeks that
you end up clocking – often mindlessly – in any case!
As you grow in your career, and as your
family grows too, you will do well to remember that no one is getting any
younger. Each milestone of your career and family will just be a memory in some
more years. There’s no point in arriving in the future to discover that you
have no, or far too few, family-related memories because you were busy working
your butt off earning a living! Living your Life
fully, while earning, is what smart people do. Surely, you are smart. And like
El-Erian, will “wake up” too!
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