Ray: Peter, many businesspeople and workers struggle to maintain balance between their personal and business lives. They confuse the two, with their personal lives often becoming subsumed by the business.
Peter: That’s the way it is. Forget about fixing it. Don’t even try to be balanced in your life. Don’t kill yourself, but my response is that your life also is lived at work.
Creating your business means something. Your business needs your attention and creative energy. To start up and run a business is to create something out of nothing. It is an enormous act of commitment and creation. You work very hard. To want to do that 9 to 5 without bringing the work home at night — well, it just doesn’t occur that way.
I have never heard of any person who created something out of nothing who slept through the night. You are supposed to wake up in the middle of the night — 2:30 a.m. to 4:15 a.m. — and worry about things over which you have no control. This means you have chosen adventure in your life.
You say to yourself, “This is the price I am paying for my own freedom and my own sense of purpose.” It is costly.
*Learn more about Peter Block and his work on organizations, community, and civic engagement at PeterBlock.com, and read more of my interviews at Hemachandra.com. This interview was conducted for New Age Retailer magazine.
