21st Edition
The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article recently on work-life balance – “Elon Musk Is All About the Nonstop Grind. And He Can’t Stop Talking About It.” According to the article, Musk is struggling to motivate his employees to work as hard as he does. The billionaire entrepreneur claims to work 120 hours a week now that he runs two companies, Tesla and Twitter. In comparison, the average hours worked per week are 37 in the U.S., 36 in Canada, 35 in France, and 34 in Germany. Elon Musk is an oddity in multiple ways, but virtually all successful entrepreneurs work well beyond 40 hours a week. Many work seven days a week, as Musk claims he does. Which begs the question – Do entrepreneurs view themselves as being unbalanced?
Musk has even called working from home morally wrong. It is understandable that a person working 120 hours a week would feel that way. Is there a minimum number of hours per week a person should work from a moral perspective? I think there are too many variables involved to answer that question unequivocally, including: relative compensation, level of responsibility, and corporate culture.
There does seem to be a trend toward a desire for better work-life balance, especially in younger employees. In my view, not wanting to follow in Musk’s footsteps in terms of working seven days a week, isn’t really a moral issue. Moreover, it misses a critical point. Just as there are tradeoffs for people who spend too much time at the office, there are different tradeoffs for people who prioritize work life balance ahead of putting in extra hours to drive entrepreneurial success.
More broadly, if this younger generation of employees continues to prioritize work-life balance, entrepreneurialism will likely suffer. And in a globally-competitive economy, how hard we work as a country matters to our long-term growth potential. A generation or two ago the American work ethic had no equal. We simply outproduced the rest of the world in the most important categories. This is no longer the case today, and the deterioration in our overall work ethic is part of the reason why.
Certainly, meaning and significance can be found outside of work, but again there are tradeoffs, in this search for work-life balance. Perhaps it isn’t so much a balance or imbalance issue, but a redefinition of what we find meaningful and significant. To some, work is meaningful, and career success leads to accomplishments in other areas like business expansion, innovation, even philanthropy and mentoring. For others work is merely a paycheck, but it provides the necessities enabling passions and energies to be refocused in other more meaningful endeavors, like coaching, volunteerism, and personal hobbies. Isn’t it unfair, or at least an oversimplification, to make moral judgments of each group? It would seem so on the surface, but when either approach to life becomes too extreme, perhaps there is a moral dilemma. In either case, there are tradeoffs. And that, I think, is what gets lost when we concentrate on these issues from a moral perspective.
On a related note, the proponents of universal income should think more thoroughly about all the tradeoffs from such a policy. Providing a level of income so a person can pursue non-work-related interests may sound like a positive thing to do on the surface. However, not only would such a program have to be subsidized by taxpayers, which brings in all sorts of equity and unfairness issues, but higher taxes are essentially a reallocation of resources from more productive uses. In a nutshell, when resources are spent in less productive ways, economic growth and future standards of living suffer.
It is possible that our society would be a kinder and happier place if people didn’t have to work so hard, but I doubt it.
I’ll give Coach Lombardi the last word, as I wonder if it still resonates with young people today, or only with old-school people like me…
“I firmly believe that any man’s finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle – victorious.”