The last couple of days have gone by in a daze. It all seems a blur when I look back. Things moved quickly, and one day merged with the other. Today, a friend of mine told me that most high risk and high reward occupations share this similarity. Our work consumes us to the extent that everything else fades into the background. This is a quality I have found in many entrepreneurs and am beginning to think that this may just be a defining quality of theirs. The ability to focus fanatically on something with the core objective of reaching a particular goal, is a necessity when you want to break away from the pack. Distractions slow you down. In order to reach your stretch goals, you have to minimize them as much as you can. This may seem somewhat extreme to some people, but in the end I think it really boils down to the choices we want to make in life.

Attached to this blog is a very interesting video. It talks about work/life balance and shows two very different points of views on the matter (You may want to view the video before reading on). Tom Nixon is an advocate of actively bringing work/life balance policies into your organization and argues that in the larger scheme of things it increases productivity and your work force is a lot happier. On the other hand Jason Calcanis whose philosophy is ‘work = life’ puts businesses into two categories. One being lifestyle businesses and the other being very large businesses. His argument is that although work/life balance can be brought into lifestyle businesses it slows people down when you have larger aspirations. He has some very strong points of view and I am not sure that I agree with all of them.

In the end both speakers talk about choices. What do you want in life? If you want to be a multi-millionaire then the consensus seems to be that big sacrifices need to be made along the way and work and life lines will get blurred. Initial startup periods will be the most demanding. This is why I do recommend starting up as soon as you can if you want to get into entrepreneurship. Start before your responsibilities increase, and the ability to make these large sacrifices decreases, get into the game early. Thinking that it is going to get easier after you have worked for x number of years and saved y$’s is not an effective strategy. Whatever you decide to do, you must truly enjoy it, and it should be the reason to get you out of bed energized everyday. Your personal happiness is something that should not be sacrificed. I wish you the best of success on whatever path you choose.

Would really like to hear the opinions of readers on what they think about the topic that was debated. Work/life balance or blood, sweat and tears?