Admittedly, this is a challenge in my life: I am, at my core, a workaholic. I am a product of an entrepreneurial family with a career in tech startups, where working 60+ hours per week (at least) was a badge of honor; I am compulsive enough by nature that it plays directly into both my work style and my ego; and I am a volunteer junkie who is the first in line to take on difficult new challenges that no one knows how to accomplish.

My husband and business partner is the opposite. While he can and has worked insane hours during various points of his professional life, it is not what he enjoys and it is not what he wants. And, for him, my over-and-above hours of work detract from our time together, which is not the trade-off he signed up for.

The VentureBeat article, titled “You work 60-hour weeks. Should your employees?” is probably made even more noteworthy by the comments left by readers. As is often the case, comments fall heavily into two camps:

The What Kind of Slacker Only Works 60 Hour Weeks? Camp — which is the modern equivelant to your grandfather’s old saying, “Back in my days, we had to walk to school a mile in the snow both ways…” It’s a sign of geek and/or entrepreneurial bravado to be the Michael Jordan of work hours, and demonstrate that you can push yourself longer and harder than those around you.

The Work Is Never Going to Love You Back Camp — who are the advocates of “work-life balance” and who are acutely aware of the fact that no one lies on their deathbed saying, “I wish I’d had just one more meeting…” It’s a sign of idiocy to this group that one would ever do anything as foolish as risk their health or personal relationships by refusing simply turn off the computer and leave work at a decent hour.

The thing that is most interesting, though, is that — as always happens in this debate — people over-look a simple, basic fact: different people need different things for different reasons.

In all the politically correct talk about “work-life balance,” there is something important that is often missed: some of us need to work long hours for reasons that have little or nothing to do with anything or anyone else. And, when we find ourselves in a work environment that does not place that demand on us, we will find a way to create it. Consider this:

Work People

• Get their energy from work.
• Derive their motivation from work-based accomplishment.
• Experience their strongest social connections to other people through work.
• Use the inertia of long hours to build momentum for accomplishing their goals.
• Find an intellectual stimulation and satisfaction in work that they don’t find anywhere else.

Life People

• Get their energy from social or personal activities.
• Derive their motivation from hobbies and social interactions.
• Seek social connections that are based on non-work interests, often as part of the respite from work.
• Require the break from work in order to recharge and return productively.
• Experience a wider array of sources that can lead to satisfying intellectual, emotional or psychological stimulation.

And while debates can wage about which side of the coin is “healthier,” it really doesn’t change the fact that my husband is unlikely to ever be an 80-hour-per-week-maniac and I am unlikely to ever be happy trying to keep my work week limited to 40 hours. We’ll each do what we need to do as circumstances demand, but what is native to each of us is different and meaningful for our own reasons.

The VentureBeat article recommends focusing on great results, not the means by which specific individuals arrive at those results. I’d agree with this approach, but take it a step further: it’s not enough to have this expectation of your staff. You have to find staff who want and thrive with high expectations.  Only hire people who like that kind of pressure and motivation.

A “life person” who is asked to work 60+ hours per week by their boss may technically put in the hours, but they are likely to trading in quantity at the expense of quality. For people who need off-hours to recharge their batteries, the point of diminishing returns comes sooner, and time put in working after that threshold is always less productive (sometimes to a costly degree).

Yes, there are always going to be times when the realities of a business require additional time and work, but I think the focus of a boss should be on finding staff whose workstyles fit what you need, rather than trying to turn who you have into someone they are not. In the end, that approach is just asking for trouble, because not only will you always be frustrated — frustrated at having to ask, frustrated by feelings of disappointment and frustrated by the results you get out of people — but you’ll also be setting your team up for failure by creating a situation that runs counter to their individual needs.

Ultimately, you can’t change a person. And asking someone to behave in a way that is fundamentally counter to their nature is never a long-term solution. So my advice is to focus on the fit first. Jim Collins refers to this as ‘getting the right people on the bus.’ If you are a workaholic who likes achieving the impossible at the drop of a hat, then an employee who rolls into the office at 10:00 and rolls out right at 6:00 is probably going to drive you crazy — no matter how much amazing work he gets accomplished in that eight hours.

Ranging from a childhood photograph of him as a little boy, sitting on a sled holding his (terrified) cat, all the way through his 80th birthday celebration, surrounded by his children and grandchildren, the video was a very sweet tribute to a life that spanned the better part of a century.

You know what was not anywhere in any of the photographic memorial of his life? His job.

I was thinking about this as I was ready Tim Berry’s horrified response to an Entrepreneur.com article entitled, “Love Your Business More than Your Family.” Mr. Berry identifies a few of the most shocking objections he has to Mr. Cloutier’s article, but I have a few others I think are worth adding.

Cloutier says: ”By all means, make it an occasion to show your spouse, kids, loved ones that you care. Then get your behind to the office because that’s where you need to be. Your family will still be there when you get home.”

Newsflash: Taking your family for granted is the world’s most sure-fire way of losing them. For starters, any spouse who puts up with being second fiddle indefinitely needs therapy to work on self-esteem issues. To be blunt, if they are less important than your job, then they would be better off without you — no matter how much money you are bringing in.

Secondly, people do not live forever. My mother died at 39 years old. Even worse, she died 28 days after she was diagnosed with leukemia. Even if she had been able to spend that 28 days living (instead of being hooked up to machines in a hospital room), you cannot make up for decades of life in 28 days.

Finally, study after study after study shows that parental involvement is key to raising healthy, stable children to be productive members of society. It’s not the responsibility of one parent, it’s the responsibility of both. If you care about your job more, then not only are you teaching your child a horrible lesson about their own self-worth (not to mention missing out on being a positive influence during their formative years), but you’re also begging for them to find other influences. Nature abhors a vacuum, and this is rarely more vivid than watching children gravitate towards unhealthy influences in the absence of healthy ones.

Cloutier says: ”If you are not focused–if family, friends and loved ones fill up your busy weekly schedule–you are probably failing to deliver real profits for your company.”

Newsflash: Your business’ success depends on more than just how much time you spend on it. Working harder but not smarter doesn’t do you any good, and other factors — business partners, market conditions, etc. — can all impact the success of your business, regardless of how much of your time you spend.

This advice is tantamount to a choice: attempt both a business and a life with decent odds of modest success, or scrap the life and roll the dice that the business can be successful enough for you to be able to successful bribe people into pretending to be a part of your life.  Sacrificing a life on the outside chance of ridiculous success and wealth is an awful big gamble.  If the dice don’t roll in your favor, then that leaves you absolutely nothing else to show for your life.

Cloutier says: ”They’d much rather enjoy great financial security than see you struggling for the rest of your life to make money that never comes.”

Newsflash: This is the kind of self-deluded justification that someone tells himself while he is waiting to pay bail for his 16-year-old who just got arrested for stealing cars.  Being able to pay for expensive therapists and lawyers does not make you a good parent.

When you die, what are your friends and family going to remember about you? How much money you left them? Maybe, but money doesn’t last and eventually it will be gone. Your kids are going to remember you teaching them to ride a bike or how to fish or about that time it started raining during your camping trip and your sleeping bag got soaked.

Do you honestly think your spouse cares more about getting a nice piece of jewelry than about watching a sunset with you on a remote beach somewhere?  (And, if your spouse does care about the jewelry more, then what was going through your mind when you married them in the first place?)  If your spouse is supposed to be content to be married to a ghost, then what good are you doing them as a spouse?

I watched the video slide show at the funeral this weekend several times. You know what I saw? I saw a man who loved his family. I saw a man with hobbies he enjoyed, and a man who belonged to communities of people with whom he had a connection. The people who were at his funeral talked about his sense of humor and his passion for life. No one once mentioned his business.

Cloutier says: ”But in the end, the best thing you can do for them is to create the legacy of a business that is thriving and financially sound. When you’re retired, wealthy, and able to spend Valentine’s Day and other special occasions with your kids and grandkids at your winter home in Hilton Head, you’ll be glad you devoted so much of your time to your first love: your business.”

Newsflash: This is what I find to be the most dangerous advice of all. If you spend your entire life loving your business more than your family, by the time you are sitting in that winter home in Hilton Head, none of your kids or grandkids are going to bother to visit you. (Nor should they.)

Life is hard. Relationships are hard. It is only the most delusional arrogance that truly claims that business is more difficult, and therefore it’s the only thing worth spending time on and worth practicing to get better at doing successfully.

If you spend 60+ years ignoring your life, by the time you put your business aside — and, let’s face it, odds are slim that someone with those priorities ever would — whatever “life” you have waiting for you is likely to be a mess. Like anything else, we only get better at life with practice. If you wait until retirement to even start, then you’re 40+ years behind everyone else.

Everyone in your life will have become so used to living without you, that trying to fit you back in will be a bigger chore than makes sense for most of them to bother with. And, just because you’ve become exceptionally skilled at business, doesn’t mean that you’ve learned how to be good at your role within your family — odds are, if you’ve neglected that role for decades, you are probably pretty lousy at it.

If you do love your business more than anything else, then do everyone a favor and skip having a family at all.  Your business is not your only job.  If you have people in your life, then you have a responsibility to them, too.  And neglecting their emotional needs — which is time-consuming, difficult work — in favor of only meeting their financial needs means that you are not doing your job.

Business people who neglect their families for their business are no more honorable than any other type of spouse or parent who doesn’t live up to their family and social obligations. They just use making money as a justification for their behavior.

And then I got a job — that ultimately turned into a career — at a start-up. Pay dirt!

The transformation that sparked in me is still an endless source of amusement among my friends. It took me a while to realize why, but eventually it was clear: the problem with school is that there was an upper limit on what I was capable of achieving. It was an artificial cap on how well I could be scored. I found that inherently disincentivizing. In business, however, there is no upper limit. You can take something as far or as high as you can push it (given the right environment, of course).

And, even better, in a scrappy, entrepreneurial, risk-taking startup (especially one trying to survive an economic downturn) someone who is hungry, talented, teachable and willing to dive into the deep end of the pool head first has tremendous opportunity for growth. The first three years of my career were the most educational, exciting and energizing time of my life — all of my years of school combined couldn’t compare to those three years. Everything was new, everything was interesting and I never once had the slightest bit of doubt that I could conquer anything that came my way.

Ah, the hubris of youth!

Of course, there were downsides. Like many young people, I didn’t know my limits and was constantly pushing the envelope in ways that I probably shouldn’t have (and in ways that I’ve since learned not to do). Whereas many 26-year-olds may be more inclined to do that with parties, I did it with work. I ended up missing a lot of important events in the lives of friends and family because of that.

I was also still extremely idealistic about a great many things. Instead of The Pragmatic Contextualist, an appropriate blog title would have been something along the lines of The Snarky Idealist or Bring it On and Get Out of the Way! (Which, ironically, is still how some people tend to view me, though I have toned down considerably with age.)

But that idealism was invaluable to me, because it made me fearless: if anything is possible and I’m extremely capable, then what do I have to be afraid of? I don’t tend to be very risk-adverse in general, but I have become more cautious with age (though, not quite enough for either my husband or father’s tastes). Back then, though, it would never occur to me that I wouldn’t figure out a way to succeed at whatever I did — which meant I was a hopeless volunteer junkie.

My biggest rush came from fixing problems, and in a post-bubble burst start-up, there were plenty of things to be fixed. So I had an endless supply of opportunity, and endless confidence in my own success. Happily, I also had bosses who went from having nothing to lose by letting me try, to truly believing in my ability to make a positive difference.

As was inevitable, a few kicks in the teeth later, and I stopped being quite so cocky. The pragmatist in me was ultimately born of those experiences, and the eternal idealist retreated to the back, only to come out for the occasional political event.

One of the biggest, most valuable lessons I learned was how to deal with chaos. More recently in my career, I had a bizarre moment when a senior IT Director — who was easily 25 years older than me — groused that we were working in “the most chaotic environment” he’d ever experienced in his life.

I wanted to laugh and call him a weenie (I restrained myself — though barely). The environment we were working in at the time was easily the least chaotic environment I’d ever experienced, and his inability to roll with the punches made him a particularly weak and frustrating leader in my opinion, because he got frazzled very easily, whined constantly and was tremendously rigid. It never occurred to me until that moment that my ability to handle chaos was all that unique.

Naturally, one of the dangers of getting a bit too used to high volumes of chaos is that you can become a drama junkie. This did happen to me, and it took me a while (and outside circumstances) to curb it. But what I have seen of most drama junkies (and trust me, I wasn’t the only one I knew) is that, the older we get, the less tolerance we have for that same constant fever-pitch of insanity.

This is another reason that I have often recommended aimless twentysomethings seeking career advice to explore startups: because by the time people are settled in their career, married or have kids, startups can be a bit too rough on the lifestyle. So if you’re going to do them, best give them a shot while you’re young, energetic, single and have as few external obligations as possible.

But when I look back on that time now, I am profoundly grateful. I was drinking from a fire hose, and it never occurred to me there was any other way to work. I got to sample a spectrum of potential opportunities and figure out which ones held some appeal, and which ones didn’t. If I had found myself in a more stable, structured environment back then, I can’t imagine where I’d be now, because the lessons I learned there, and the all-you-can-eat-buffet of opportunities that I had available to me at the time are how I found my way into a career.

In the scheme of things, I look back on the most pivotal, impactful decisions of my life and the day I left the famed O’Reilly Publishing — which is where I thought I’d wanted to work for years — and went to MarketLive (at the time it was still called MultimediaLive) was one of them. And since then, I have found myself encouraging twentysomethings who do not know what they want out of a career to look at startups, because as long as they can develop a bit of tolerance for chaos (which I firmly believe everyone should do), they’ll usually find opportunities they never knew existed.

What do you think? Are startups a good or bad place to start out your career?

Conversely, a dear friend who is in the process of developing a business from a one-man shop to a full-scale product company, disagrees strongly. While he has never been an advocate for ‘butts in chairs’ as an organizing model in general, he definitely doesn’t subscribe to the idea that the people you would pull together to get a business started can’t do what they need to do virtually. If someone is good enough for you to enlist to help get a business off the ground, then they should be talented enough to do what they need to do remotely, while communicating with the rest of the team in an effective manner.

However, he does admit to a single hurdle that will quickly need a solution: team-building — which ultimately leads to organizing models and culture.

In the most immediate term, the easiest way around this is for the people working together to found the company to already know each other. If those in the trenches to get it off the ground have worked together in the past, have long-standing relationships (both personal and professional, ideally), and respect each other’s abilities, then it there is a foundation of mutual trust that helps get the ball rolling.

But there are still obstacles with that, even among people with common work histories and mutual trust.

What is everyone doing?

This is the area where newer organizations, if they implement some basic technology solutions in the beginning, can really set a strong precedent for organizational transparency. Enterprise 2.0 has some great capabilities when it comes to finding ways for people to have a transparent audit-trail of their day, that can be visible to everyone.

What code did your developer fix? What are the status of the bugs? How many phone calls did your salesperson make? What is the state of the new partner contract? Has there been any performance degradation today? Which client just requested a new project? Almost all areas of a business can be supported by tools that have standard out-put capabilities (such as RSS), which can be aggregated centrally so that an entire, geographically distributed team can see what is going on in everyone else’s corner of the business.

For some people this is a bit on the creepy ‘big brother’ side. I’ll concede that I can understand why. But this is where the reason for it is important, and where the cultural element is critical: this is about building a culture of transparency, not a culture of mistrust. The “how” and the “why” make all the difference when it comes to the “what.”

If leadership were excluded from this type of transparent work tracking, then it would be easy to argue ‘big brother.’ But the idea is that this starts with an organization’s leadership. They are leading the way by ensuring that their activities are truly transparent.

So much of the Enterprise 2.0 sector is focused on transforming established businesses into transparent and collaborative environments that we don’t spend a lot of time discussing the first rule of building something new: lay the right foundation to begin with, and you can build whatever you want on top of it.

Penelope Trunk made a great point when we spoke: the technology a business chooses to implement speaks to their culture and their values. She is right. Businesses getting started today have almost no technical or financial excuse for not leveraging some great technical solutions — all of which can help reinforce some essential cultural values — to get work done. Cloud computing and SaaS (often freemium) solutions are too pervasive.

If you want your team to collaborate, set up a wiki. If you want feed everyone’s activities for the day into a centralize spot and can’t afford to buy a solution yet, use Yahoo! Pipes. If you want a centralized dashboard that everyone can access easily, use Google Apps. If you’re totally overwhelmed and have no idea what you need, check out Zoho or one of Mashable’s infamous and extremely helpful lists. There are plenty of solutions, most of them with free (or at least very low cost) options. And if you start off using them from day one, they will become part of everyone’s routine and you can skip the painful change management efforts that come with trying alter everyone’s behavior down the line.

Blowing Off Steam, Celebrating and Bonding

Ultimately, the truly hard part about having a virtual team is that there is a certain degree of bonding that really just requires face-to-face interaction. This is where it is most helpful if your virtual team isn’t so far apart as to preclude semi-regular face-time with each other (i.e. if the team is scattered around the Bay Area, but can meet for long lunches/working sessions every couple of weeks at a centralized location). However, sometimes this simply isn’t possible, and the team is a couple thousand miles away (or more). This is where you have a real challenge.

The strongest bonds I’ve ever forged with co-workers — and the point at which co-workers really started becoming true friends — were always a result of bonding under extremely stressful circumstances. It’s the ‘war buddies’ syndrome. You always learn the most about people when you put them under true pressure. And the bonds that form between people under those conditions are commonly very strong. But more often than not, they are strongest when everyone is in the same room.

So how do you truly build a cohesive, trusting, bonded team when everyone is dialed in on an ooVoo conference call from their home office? Particularly once the company starts growing a bit, and it is no longer 2-4 people who all already know each other, how do you start adding in more of the expertise you need without adversely impacting the group dynamic?

This is an on-going source of debate and speculation. Most of the more robust and well-tested virtual team-building models are based around taking formerly co-located teams and re-distributing them (think IBM giving up office space and sending their employees to work from their home offices). So while a quick Google search on “virtual team building” comes up with a host of plausible hits, in the end, most of them are variations on cheesy in-person team building exercises that I rarely find all that effective.

As VC funding continues to dry up, and small startups are forced to do more bootstrapping, geographically distributed companies are going to become increasingly common simply because office space is too expensive and people can’t afford to pick up and move for a low-paying/high-risk startup role. That is going to force a lot of experimentation in this are, and many of these models will have to be developed.

Of course, odds are that my friend’s model will be a common one: if you are going to roll the dice on a new business, it usually feels like a safer bet doing it with someone you not only know, but someone you know you can work with. So, as with many other things about a small startup, you can get away with certain short-cuts in the early days that you have to keep an eye on, because they rarely scale the way you need them to, and if you aren’t paying attention, they’ll come back and bite you before you know it.

Grant me strength to accept the things that I can’t change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.

Since 2003, I have been working really, really hard on changing the things I can change. Everything from my work-over-life habits, to my physical health, to my determination to stay in my hometown because it was too easy to bother doing anything else. “Change” has been my mantra.

But it’s also been my addiction, and this gets me to where I am now. I got in the habit of changing things just because I could. I was enjoying the novelty of that, and was finding it invigorating. I still do a lot of times. But, now I have a husband who likes things to be a bit more stable than that, and I have realized that — much as I like to think otherwise — there are some things that I haven’t really changed, no matter how much window dressing I put up to try to make things look different.

This is particularly true in some of the most frustrating areas of my professional life. In the past, I have been notorious for being passionate, a bit volatile (a “bit”! Ha!), inclined towards taking things personally, having no boundaries, etc. Since late 2003 I have been working on all of those things, and some of them have been harder than others. But there is one area that no matter how much effort I put into it, my internal needle doesn’t seem willing to budge. And that is my ability to fake how I feel about something.

One of my strengths is that, when I feel strongly about something, I am a force of nature. My commitment level is unparalleled, my ability to motivate anyone is unmatched, and my energy level is uncontainable. My husband, my former bosses and co-workers and my friends all tend to enjoy seeing me this way, because my energy and enthusiasm is contagious, and they all have found themselves swept up in my tidal wave of excitement.

Of course, it is the other side of that coin that tends to be a problem. When I am unhappy in a given situation, I have a near impossible time containing it. I really try, but I could never be an actress, because the one thing I can’t do convincingly is fake emotion on demand. And the more unhappy I get, the less I can contain it. This gets me into huge, huge amounts of trouble. It has caused me to leave jobs, even when it was not necessarily in my long-term best interest. It has caused me to burn bridges I didn’t necessarily need to burn.

But, because it is something that I have been adamant I need to control, I have spent years trying to convince myself that it is only a sheer force of will that stands between my normal patterns and new ones. And now I’m not so sure.

I look around me at the people who make awesome consultants. They are people who can fake interest and enthusiasm so well they deserve an Oscar. Because I have spent years wanting to be a consultant, I have tried convincing myself that I was capable of that, too. But the more time goes one, the less convinced I am of that.

I have some dear people in my life — husband, mentor, friends, father — who have ridiculously challenged relationships with time. And no amount of effort fundamentally changes that. So the shift moves from CHANGING it, to MANAGING it.

I think this is where I am when it comes to my ability to fake my emotions. After years of trying to convince myself I could CHANGE this about myself, I think I have now arrived at the conclusion that the best I can hope to do is to MANAGE it, instead.

So what does this mean? First and foremost, this means that I start listening to my gut and not trying to convince myself that, by sheer force of will, my brain will be able to over-ride all of my emotional reactions. When I feel that familiar feeling that I am setting myself up for a disaster by trying to force a situation that fundamentally makes me unhappy, I need to stop and GET OFF the bus. For years I have continued to let myself be boxed in tighter and tighter, and then eventually, I end up exploding. And when that happens, I make a bigger mess than I ever needed to.

If I had walked away when I first noticed the signs, an amicable parting has always been possible. It’s only waiting too long, until tempers are running hot and patience is running out, that things become unsalvagable.

So, now I find myself in a strange position: because, like I’ve written before, I don’t like to quit, am I being a quitter by accepting that I may not be able to change this about myself, and focusing instead on management? Or am I being a pragmatist who is owning her short-comings and recognizing that some things really aren’t ever going to change?

Probably a little bit of both. I know I’m not going to give up and just universally accept that just because it’s hard that I can’t change something; but I also need to recognize that some things just need to be managed, and deluding myself into thinking that I can bulldoze my way through something is arrogant and impractical — and tends to make life more complicated than it needs to be.

So, for now I focus on management. And, the truth is, when there is something that I get truly excited about, my inability to fake my emotions serves me very well. And I’d be afraid that changing one side of that coin could have an adverse impact on the other, too.

Implications of Being “Even”
The first definition for “balance” on Dictionary.com defines the word as:

a state of equilibrium or equipoise; equal distribution of weight, amount, etc.

While I recognize that the phrase is not literally intended to mean that there should be a minute-by-minute division of one’s day, the fact is that “work-life balance” implies that one’s work and personal lives are supposed to be (at least reasonably) evenly balanced. That is a flawed assumption.

For starters, as a rather classic ENTJ, I would argue that assuming I could possibly be happy with that much of my time focused on non-professional activities is presumptuous and inaccurate. For me only working 60 hours per week is ‘taking it easy,’ and there is no way that anyone else’s expectation of how much time I “should” be spending outside of work changes the fact that is simply not who I am or who I want to be. Period.

On the flip side, the best example I know of is my younger sister. She easily has 30 IQ points on me, and yet she does not have a career-oriented, ambitious bone in her body. She has spent her entire career careening from one dead-end, mindless job to the next. She has been happiest when she was not working at all, but was a stay-at-home wife experimenting with organic and/or vegan recipes, doting over her cats and playing computer games all day. For her the only reason to have a job is to have a paycheck, and even then, only if there are not other arrangements that can be made so she can simply avoid the entire unpleasant mess.

If the universe were to decide to amuse itself and play a Freaky Friday on the two of us, we’d both be miserable. By lunchtime I’d be breaking into the liquor cabinet; and she’d probably call in sick and not bother going to work at all. By the time we switched back, I’d return to my life to discover that she’d thrown away all non-organic food products in my house and updated the OS/service packs on my computer; and she’d return to her life to discover that she had half a dozen job interviews lined up and her three rooms worth of pack-ratted storage had all been hauled to the dump. Neither of us would be happy, because both of us are most happy when our lives are completely ‘out of balance.’

Dividing the Red Sea
The other objection I have to the idea of “work-life balance” is the idea that there is a hard-and-fast separation between work and the rest of your life. I suppose for some people, this is probably the case. I have known a few people in my career who do not make a habit of socializing with co-workers and who, once out of the office for the evening, are disengaged and ‘out of pocket’ until they return the next morning. However, coming from a technology and start-up background, those people are in the extreme minority of my experience. Most people that I know flunk on the ‘work-life balance’ if for no other reason than because there is not that clear of a distinction between their work life ends and their personal life begins.

Since the time I started working full-time in my early 20′s (even before I was done with college) my closest friendships have always been with people I met at/through work. Always. And while we certainly do and talk about other things when we are together outside of the office, we also talk about work and our careers. There is no clear line where one stops and the other starts.

On top of which, there is a universal truth about the tech sector: tech geeks are tech geeks at home as well as at work. How many server engineers have you met who rebuild machines at home all the time just for fun? How many of them have servers in their garage (or pantry) that run their home network? And how many of them come into work eager to try a new trick that they spent the weekend experimenting with and want to apply it to the work environment? Ditto with developers and all other types of tech geeks. And, in a 24/7 web-run world, you never launch, upgrade or convert anything during the day. That always happens late at night. And people rarely come into the office for that. Instead, we all get online, jump on a bridge call, and work from home in our pajamas all night. Further blurring the line between work and life.

Another issue I have with this concept is that I find it to be semi-disingenuous political correctness in good times, and then completely absent in bad times. I’ve never been at a company that touted the importance of work-life balance in good times that didn’t stop as soon as economic conditions turned south.

We’ve past the point where the phrase “work-life balance” either suits us or serves a genuine purpose. The real notion is “work-life integration” or “work-life compatibility” (for the late adopters and/or non-info workers out there). Most people only work because they need a paycheck (or benefits, etc.), which means that often the life side of the equation is what matters most. Those of us who work even when we don’t get a paycheck need far more time spent on work on any given day. It’s only the small minority who fall somewhere in between really stand a chance of finding that mythical “balance.” For the rest of us, finding an integrated solution is what we need so that we can keep our focus where it needs to be — wherever we are, or whatever we are doing.

In John’s case, part of what made that such an addictive cocktail was his demeanor: John is a very mild-mannered, soft spoken, introverted person. He embodies a very Confucian-type ethic of quiet, steadfast leadership. As a reasonably quiet person, he is someone you often have to silence yourself to listen to — which ultimately means that he gets your undivided focus. John projects a sense of serenity and calm, even in the eye of the storm, and he is masterful about sharing that sense of calm with those around him.

Of course, the irony is that John would probably laugh at that description of him. But the fact is that, particularly in chaotic, dynamic or even out-right dysfunctional environments, someone like John functions as a sanity touchstone who is often instrumental in helping to keep people focused without burning themselves out. And part of the way in which he accomplishes that is by sharing his sense of focused calm with you, and making you feel like you and your problem is the most important thing in the world.

Never underestimate the astounding impact you can have on someone by spending a few minutes making them feel truly heard, and like their problems are genuinely important to you. I can’t count how many times John’s calm, soothing attention brought me back from the brink of some precipitous (and likely regrettable) behavior. And, even more graciously, he always managed to do it without making me feel judged, which was especially valuable once I calmed down and started feeling a bit stupid for allowing myself to get so worked up. And when he was off-site for a long-term project for the better part of a year, and couldn’t be there for me in person, knowing that I was struggling without his direct support and guidance, he emailed me (ironically, always when I needed it most) to tell me that I was doing a great job, and that he understood and was grateful for the burdens I was carrying with little or no help. Six years later I still have those emails. They are a reminder to me of the value of small gestures.

None of this is to say that John doesn’t get upset or impatient or frustrated (and sometimes even show it), but no matter how rough a day John was ever having, I never saw him turn away someone who was struggling. And once his attention was on them, his calming reassurance was always the elixir they needed to pull themselves back up by their bootstraps, and head back out to tackle whatever big bad monster had just kicked their asses and made them want to crawl into a hole.

People who didn’t have that relationship with John often wondered what it was about him that bred such intense affection and loyalty among those of us who did, and the answer is deceptively simple: anytime our faith in ourselves was the most bruised, battered and questionable, John’s faith in us and our abilities helped to restore our confidence and help us face the world again. It was an amazing gift, and one that I work every day to emulate.

Related Boss Lessons
• Lesson #2: Own Your Priorities (Robert)
• Lesson #3: Don’t Get Emotional (Dave)