Do You Work Too Much?

Dateline: January 31, 2014

Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend.

This is our last week to officially explore personal leadership topics, although I can’t promise that we will avoid these topics in the future.  This week’s thought comes from Harvard Business Review’s Blog Network. Duke University Adjunct Professor Dorie Clark posted a blog titled, Why Can’t We Stop Working, where she explored what drives so many of us to work more than reasonably healthy for us to do. She writes,

For many top performers, the idea of dialing back on work is also disturbing because they fear it will torpedo their career. Partly, of course, this anxiety is exaggerated. Since humans fear loss more than they covet gain, it’s easy to frame any deceleration as the loss of our career potential and a potentially disastrous mistake. But to complicate matters, in some particularly competitive fields like investment banking or corporate law, long hours truly are mandatory. And, culturally, we’re regaled with examples like Tesla’s Elon Musk, a twice-divorced father of five who took one vacation during a four-year period.

Do you fear loss more than you covet gain?  Do you work too much?

That’s a WRAP!  Have a nice weekend.