“It’s just work,” said an old friend of mine at lunch earlier today. He recently became a father. He recently changed jobs. I looked at him and felt both envious of and sorry for him. Sometimes I agree with him. Usually it’s when I lose my optimism.

When you go to work, who are you? Do the lines between your personal and professional lives blur? Are your coworkers also your friends, partners, people who know more sides of you than anyone else?

The more I read, the more people I meet, the more it seems that many of the most satisfied people have merged the different aspects of their lives. They channel passion into their work, become very successful because they are doing what they love to do, and subsequently attract people they know and trust to work with them. Work and play together, and you reveal more sides of who you are. Satisfying. Scary. Probably hard to go back to the compartmentalized, earlier life. How would that feel? Work. Stop. Play. Stop. Rinse. Repeat.

What would it be like to merge your lives into one? How would that change your week? If you could structure your life however you wanted, what would you do? Who would you be? Maybe you are already there.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 11th, 2007 at 2:48 pm and is filed under Ruminations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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