I’ve been hearing a lot about work/life balance these days from corporations and politicians. It seems that everyone wants to talk about how you can be successful at work and have a life too. In my career that was never the case.
I started at Microsoft in 1991 at the ripe old age of 35. That seems pretty young to me now but at the time I was the old guy. Everyone else was much younger; most of the people were straight out of college. I had a wife and two kids while a lot of people there were single. These people put in a ton of hours and a lot of them got great results because of it. They didn’t care about work/life balance because work was their life, and that thinking was reinforced by the Microsoft review model that rewarded such behavior.