WWBD: What would Bezos Do?
According to Jeff Bezos, work life balance is a "debilitating phrase" that implies there's a "strict trade-off between the two". WWBD?
Jeff Bezos - yes that Jeff Bezos - founder, multi billionaire, and former CEO of Amazon, is on the record as not believing in the concept of “work life-balance”, that it’s over-rated and somehow work ethic has become under-rated. Along with every story attempting to relate to the “common man”, like how Jeff still washes his own dishes, a glimpse of the full Bezos experience leaks out when he tries to give any advice about business or life in general. Just read any of the dozens of stories out there about crazed working conditions at Amazon, and you’ll know Bezos is serious. Is his over-the-top approach to work the only one that “works”? WWBD?
I’ll be the first to admit that my life is not balanced. I put a lot of time into everything I do - my job and my family have just as much of my time and energy. The only way I keep things going is to give up on sleep. This is a good example - I’m writing this post on a holiday in Japan right now, up at the crack of dawn before any of my family wakes up. Why do I keep doing this to myself and is this type of relentlessness a good thing in the long run?
It’s not just me though right? Everyone around me seems to be doing everything all at once and most of the time we’re screwing something up despite our best intentions. Today let’s try to figure out if Jeff Bezos is right. If we choose true balance in our work and personal lives are we destined for mediocrity? I honestly don’t have the answer to this, but as a teacher I try to do as much reading and thinking as I can then go back to the basics.
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“"We are comfortable planting seeds and waiting for them to grow into trees" - Jeff Bezos.
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When should I start thinking about Work-Life Balance?
I know my online audience typically skews young, but on the off chance more mature audiences are reading - yes, I agree. Another young person scared of a bit of hard work? Time to toughen up, dust myself off, pick myself up, roll up my sleeves, quit whinging, just get on with it…
That has been the conventional wisdom, but really it’s never too early to think about work-life balance. Every little bit adds up over the long run, and the compounding effect of habits over decades throughout your career can work for you or against you in equal measure. Does that mean a student fresh out of uni or college should immediately find work that perfectly balances with every aspect of their personal lives? No you won’t have the leverage, or career capital, but knowing what feels “unbalanced” to you can set you up for the long term. As you progress in your career, your priorities and responsibilities will change, so it’s best if you develop a consistent strategy as early as you can to find your own balance. How should we define balance, or unbalance for that matter?
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“I do get asked, quite frequently: ‘what’s gonna change in the next 10 years?’ I rarely get asked, and it’s probably more important — and I encourage you to think about this — is the question what’s not going to change? The answer to that question can allow you to organize your activities. You can work on those things with the confidence to know that all the energy you put into them today is still going to pay dividends in the years to come” - Jeff Bezos.
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We launched a podcast! Episode 2 of the Crossover Connections Podcast talks about the hidden costs of innovation - from telescopes to microscopes. Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or watch the video version on YouTube.
What does balance look like? Well it all depends.
When you google the concept of “work-life balance”, the main takeaway message seems to be “it depends”. What works for you won’t work for someone else, my idea of balance is different to yours. There are certain types of personalities and job descriptions that are more at risk of work life imbalance. Yes entrepreneurs, from small business owners to tech startups have everything on the line every quarter, and shrinking budgets to recruit new personnel to help out. It doesn’t matter what you do though - a teacher like me, marking papers and lesson planning on your weekends, a first-year intern at a big firm or hospital, or just a single parent trying to pay the bills without your kid catching every communicable disease under the sun. Everyone is off-kilter, ready to be unbalanced at a moment’s notice.
I’m no Jeff Bezos, but I’m a scientist, professor, and YouTuber. Scientists are under constant pressure to publish research papers, obtain funding, and compete with the best in the world to make breakthroughs in our field. Professors have all of those duties as well as teaching responsibilities, plus administrative roles on committees, that all add up to more meetings and workload. YouTubers are under pressure for each video to go viral, and grow our channels, so that each video doesn’t have an super low number of views, and constantly update all of our social media channels. The thing is I can’t really blame anyone else - I really love doing all these things, but I don’t ‘compromise on my family commitments either. There’s no way to do all the things I love it seems and keep it within a 40 hour work week.
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If you had gone to a customer in 2013 and said, 'would you like a black, always-on cylinder in your kitchen about the size of a Pringles can that you can talk to and ask questions, that also turns on your lights and plays music?' I guarantee you they'd have looked at you strangely and said, 'No, thank you.’” - Jeff Bezos.
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Whose idea was this anyway?
There’s some debate as to who came up with the 40 hour work week as a concept, but it was popularised by the industrialist Henry Ford. Not for an entirely selfless reason of course, say for the health and well being of mankind, but by reducing the work week his employees would have more time to want to drive around, and in turn buy the very cars they were building at Ford. Buying a car was part of the “American Dream”, and there’s no point owning a nice car if you never had anywhere to drive to. Rather cynically, Ford knew that he could make more profit if his employees (and really the rest of working class America) had more down time. This written into legislation in 1938 in the Fair labor standards act in the United states - any time over 40 hours work a week needs extra pay. This figure is a bit of an arbitrary number though, and most people need to put in a lot more work just to stay ahead. The preparation before starting your working week can be 10 to 20 hours, and we’re all doing this somewhat “willingly” just to keep our jobs or propel our careers forward.
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“‘Jeff, what does Day 2 look like?’” “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.” - Jeff Bezos
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Where can a lot MORE work take you?
Here in Japan, the idea of voluntary “overtime” is baked into the cake so to speak. From what I’ve read, heard, and observed first hand, the emphasis on collective responsibility in Japanese culture means that everyone prioritises the needs of the company, their boss, and their colleagues over their own personal needs. I can’t lie, this concept is super appealing to me - and I respect this notion so much - everything is organised, well-thought out, and planned, because everyone involved in the endeavour has put in extra work. But the fact that there is a term in the Japanese Zeitgeist: “karoshi”, which literally means “death by overwork” suggests that this is not a balanced setup. There is literally a phenomenon where Japanese people are frequently dying from working excessive hours.
There is a sense of loyalty, dedication, and hierarchy to your company, and you’re not supposed to leave work until your immediate superior knocks off for the day. There’s also the idea of “lifetime employment”, where employees are expected to stay with the same company for their whole career. The pressure never lets up, and extra hours all add up. I respect what this culture has created, and how wonderful it is to visit as a tourist or consumer - but on the surface it doesn’t seem to be what I’m looking for right now. I can learn so much from this way of working and the productivity it creates but that’s another topic for another day.
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“The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs.” - Jeff Bezos.
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Where can a lot LESS work take you?
What about the other end of the extreme? “The 4-Hour Work Week" is a bestselling book written by Tim Ferriss - book summaries of it are all over the internet, because that’s who it’s written for - tech or business entrepreneurs trying to take advantage of the new digital economy. From 40 hours down to 4-hours? A promise of more freedom and flexibility if you out-source and automate a big part of your job? I won’t try to review the book, or go over its findings, but this seems absolutely great for those that have the bandwidth to pursue their independent careers in the marketplace.
It’s not a fantastic fit for me though, because I’m in a traditional career path so to speak. Most people in fact, are pursuing a traditional career path - when I talk to young people everyday as part of my day job in academic and career counselling, most are looking to find meaning and purpose through a traditional career path too. So maybe the answer is we all need to be looking outside of these arenas? Yes if we’re generating enough revenue to be able to pay someone else to do part of our job, at least 70% as well, then that makes sense. Financial freedom is great, and we should all be working smarter not harder. But again the vast majority of professions out there that provide a fundamental service to society - doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists, journalists - we don’t have the luxury of choosing our working hours and deciding that we should be automating our jobs away unless our boss or the whole industry moves in that direction. I think this seems to be tilting the scale too much in the “life” direction over work, and applies more to people venturing out as an entrepreneur - more power to you, I think it’s amazing and more of you should go out and do this - but it doesn’t really help me (and probably many of you) in this moment.
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"Friends congratulate me after a quarterly-earnings announcement and say, 'Good job, great quarter.'" "And I'll say, 'Thank you, but that quarter was baked three years ago.'" - Jeff Bezos.
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Why is balance so hard to find?
I am skewed towards the work side of the equation, but I’m sure there are just as many people skewed in the other direction. Maybe you can’t find the drive or motivation to do the work you think you need to do to get ahead? Psychology is not my field of expertise, but from what I have read you either fall into one of two camps. Motivation before action, or action before motivation. It’s easy to procrastinate, play games, watch shows or YouTube videos, and tell ourselves that we’ll start doing work when it feels “right”, when motivation or inspiration hits us. How and when this happens is really hard to predict, because motivation is dictated by a complex set of intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Our emotions, our personality, our goals - these are internal or intrinsic to us. The lure of good grades, a high-paying job, the amount of support we have from teachers, parents, and friends, these are extrinsic, or external to us.
The thing is none of these factors are really within our control, but if we luck out and have the right personality, support network, and incentives around us at all times, motivation won’t be a problem. This is why more and more people are subscribing to the notion that action, more specifically habitual actions or habits, leads to motivation. You put in the work first as your routine, learning new skills bit by bit, and over time you will get better. It will be more pleasurable to do the thing you’re good at. You can then teach others how to do the thing you’re good at, which is also more rewarding. This makes sense to me, but there does need to be a spark of motivation to get started with a habit in the first place, so I think habit and motivation are very much interdependent rather than one beating the other. But habits unlike motivation are within our control as individuals, to have a system in place that fosters small incremental learning of new skills as a habit, rather than searching out random bursts of motivation outside of our immediate control.
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“I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out." - Jeff Bezos.
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How we can make unhealthy obsessions into healthy ones.
Avoiding 100 hour work weeks, and aiming to be more productive in less time (but maybe more than 4 hours a week), and forming habits to develop valuable skills that will in turn motivate us to keep going. Where does that leave me? I don’t lack motivation, I love learning new skills, but I can certainly work a lot smarter and be more selective in what I spend my time on (I am experimenting a lot with automation and AI). But all of this takes so much thinking and cognitive burden to get right - if automation frees my time up, can I be trusted to use that time wisely? Because of all that intrinsic motivation and productivity habits, will I just double down and pick even harder more complex tasks to do instead of trying to relax?
Therein lies the difference between a healthy obsession, when we are passionate and driven about the thing we choose to spend time on, versus an unhealthy obsession that consumes the other parts of our lives.
Are you having constant or recurring thoughts about any part of your life (good or bad) that makes you lose sleep?
Do you feel anxious or stressed when you don’t spend time working on that thing?
Do you have difficulty relaxing or enjoying other activities even when you have time off work?
I think this is much more meaningful than any arbitrary number of hours you’re working a week, because again everyone has a different threshold or tolerance for how much they invest into any one part of their lives.
If I’m honest with myself, I’m 3 for 3 on the unhealthy obsession check list, in almost every aspect of my job, but it’s not always like that - it veers in and out from healthy to unhealthy depending on the time of year, but lately it’s much more consistently in the unhealthy territory. I think the only way I can find balance moving forward is to constantly re-evaluate my situation. Like everyone else I used to do this once a year around the start of every year - around now actually, but maybe I need to think more like a business and do quarterly or monthly reviews? Make a spreadsheet of all the things I spent time on each week, over the past few weeks, and tally up the hours for the top 10 tasks that took up the most amount of my time. Reflect on this every month, and see if it’s still the 10 things that I want to be spending most of my time on. If it’s not, can I automate or delegate any of them? Or do I need more career capital and leverage before I can get to that point?
At the end of the day, WWBD? Is work-life balance over-rated if you actually want to achieve something in life? I have no idea if he’s right, but he has certainly said a lot about a great many things in increasingly bizarre ways. In Jeff’s own words:
“People who are right most of the time are people who change their minds often”.
I don’t have all the answers, but I’m willing to ask the questions.
Talk soon,
Jack.
