Ask HN: Have you found success and a good work life balance?
There is no universal &quot;good work life balance&quot;.  What works for one person, does not work for another.  Even the phrase &quot;work life balance&quot; implies a particular solution, which I think is often damaging to people.  It implies that there is work, which when I&#x27;m doing it suspends my life.  It implies that work is inherently bad for your life goals.<p>Interestingly, I taught English as a foreign language in Japan for 5 years.  I had a colleague who was giving a class on different professions and she asked the students (first year high school&#x2F;grade 10) what profession they wanted.  Many girls in the class said, &quot;I want to be a mother&quot;.  This infuriated my colleague who chastised the students and told them not to &quot;waste their life&quot;.<p>Of course, being a full time parent is actually a risky proposition in your career.  You have to depend on your spouse for making money.  If things don&#x27;t work out, you don&#x27;t have a lot of security.  From that perspective, I completely understand my colleague&#x27;s reaction.  What I find interesting is the feeling that the choice of &quot;full time parent&quot; is considered an unfit career, regardless of risk.  Had the students said they wanted to be musicians, a career with considerably more risk, my colleague would not have reacted in such a hostile way.<p>When put in that light, what <i>is</i> your career to your life?  If you spend your time lounging on the beach drinking pina coladas all day, have you &quot;made it&quot;?  What if you sit on the street corner drinking cheap whiskey?  Are you wasting your life if you achieve nothing in your career?  How much of your time on earth should you devote to that work?  If you spend your time simply amassing money, have you failed since you did not spend that time curing cancer?  Do you need to make up for your complete waste of time making money by donating it at the end of your life?<p>Of course, I&#x27;m being facetious.  Your choice of what your want to accomplish and how much of your time your want to spend on it is up to you.  Some jobs require considerably more effort than others.  Look at the life of the average rock star.  Many of them do 300 or more concerts a year.  That&#x27;s a work load that would bury the average software developer, but it&#x27;s generally necessary at the top end of that profession.<p>My advice, for what it&#x27;s worth, is to try to find a job that is satisfying to you and for which the time spent does not seem to be wasted.  Don&#x27;t partition your life between &quot;things I want to do&quot; and &quot;things I have to do&quot;.  Yes, there will always be things that you have to do that you may not want to.  But instead of trying to avoid the things you have to do, try to find things that you want to do and make them things you have to do.