Is there such a thing as work-life balance when you love your work?—a startup CEO perspective

Anna Rys
Anna Rys
Aug 27, 2017 · 7 min read

I’m not one to get easily attached to things, places or people. I don’t get excited easily and I don’t fall into despair when things go wrong. I’m not saying I like it or do it in order to keep some sort of a balance in my life. It’s just the way I am. Balanced at mind, unbalanced at heart.

Yet, somehow, there are days when I feel ecstatic after a day of productive work and seeing that what my team does brings us closer and closer to launching our product. Then, right after, I get a little terrified about all the possible things that may go wrong during and after the launch. But, just a second later, I think about the people I work with and that puts a huge grin on my face again (before it even had the time to turn into a frown).

Talking about the emotional roller-coaster of a startup life, ey? And that’s only the tip of the iceberg that starts melting into the ocean of your life (don’t laugh, I think it’s a beautiful metaphor… that I just came up with) when you decide to “do startups”.

So, how do I manage to maintain any sort of balance?

The quick answer is: I don’t.

Sorry to be the one to bring that one out to you but, maintaining the so-called work-life balance (if you ever considered work as something separate from life…) — especially while running a startup — is close to impossible.

The good news is that loving your job isn’t such a bad thing. It helps you live a life in which you (almost) never think “I wish I could just get out of here and do something I actually care about”. So, all you have to do is find a job you love. Or create one for yourself.

The bad news (again) is that:

  1. It may take you a while to find something you love doing that also allows you to make a living.
  2. When you love your job, it starts taking up even more of your precious lifetime. Which may not always be a good thing.

But hey, if you do something you love, that’s not really a job, right?

What makes you smile?

I’m a bit of a hedonist. But then, again, who isn’t? Most people do things that are supposed to make them happy or, at least, that help them avoid being unhappy (let’s assume, for the sake of the argument, that the ubiquitous pain of living doesn’t count here).

So, my general rule is that, when something tickles my insides (in a positive way) and makes me smile or laugh, I like that something.

Wouldn’t life be so much easier if everyone did what makes them smile, while allowing others to get the pleasure out of their own positive internal tickles?

That’s the way I try to live my life: by doing things that make me smile and surrounding myself with people that make me happy (while being happy themselves, of course — otherwise it doesn’t work). But it wasn’t always that way.

How much of your gut should you trust anyway?

I’m a strong believer in data-supported gut instinct. Even more so after finding out that the gut is our second brain. I’ve learned it the hard way though, both in my personal and professional life. Let me concentrate on the latter here.

I’ve never worked in a big corporation, so I have no idea how things work there. But, I’m assuming, that working with people you like is one f the most important things that define whether you feel good at work.

I was lucky enough to always work with good people. But it wasn’t until I became responsible for my own company, TurboTranslations, that I realized how crucial working with the right people is. Back then, there were three of us: my two co-founders and myself. Plus some other people involved in the project. It was a little chaotic and I had no idea why they wanted me to be the CEO of all that. But that’s a whole different story that I may feel inclined to write about some other time.

Being a fresh CEO, I made a ton of mistakes and learned a lot along the way. One of those things was that you should never work with people you don’t feel at least somewhat good about from the start, even if they have the right skillset and expertise for the job. On the other hand, I also learned that, even when you feel like someone is an ideal fit for your team, if they don’t have the slightest inclination of being skilled at what you need them to be skilled at… it’s risky to hire them. And, since you like them from the start, it will be hard to fire them in case things go awry.

I have a feeling I should explore the topic of building a team and hiring a little more in a whole different article though. Right after I learn how to do it better, test a few more approaches and have more data to analyze :).

In any case, I do believe that trusting your intuition is, in most cases, a good thing.

A friend once told me that there’s no such thing as intuition. It’s just a pool of experiences and knowledge, buried so deeply in our brains that we don’t even know it’s there, which we draw from without even realizing it. Maybe that pool is ingrained in our second brain, the gut. Maybe that’s why it’s called “the gut feeling”. Maybe that’s why, when used right and not forgotten about, the intuition becomes a very powerful tool.

How happy are you about your Mondays?

I don’t necessarily work 9 to 5, but that’s when I can be found at the AnyMind office most often. Even if I had some trouble getting off the bed in the morning (seriously, stop associating loving your bed with not loving your job…), I come in to say hi to everyone and that immediately puts a smile on my face. And, as I’ve already mentioned, I like doing what makes me smile. That’s how I know it’s the right place for me. Oftentimes, I feel better at the office than out of it. Unless I’m out of the office, taking about work (kidding… sort of).

I’m a little impatient to get back to the office when my weekends aren’t full of pastime activities. We’re still pre-launch though, so I try to get as much out of my weekends as I can, because I know things are going to get even more hectic once people actually start using our platform and messing around with it. I still think about work a lot, but I try to keep it at bay and enjoy my time off work as much as I enjoy my time at work.

So, hey, I guess I’m not a workaholic (yet)!

Getting back to the subject at hand though, I think it’s hard to balance your work and the rest of your life if your work is your life.

Is it a bad thing? I don’t know… Sometimes I wish I had more time for helping out with initiatives like Smogathon, exercising more, pursuing my (nonexistent) acting career, or simply spending time with someone I care about. All those things make me equally happy as my work at the moment, but I’m really not sure if they make me much happier. If they did, maybe I would feel some sort of a dissonance that would make me feel unhappy. Meanwhile, I only wish I could organize myself better and have more time for both working more and living more.

Should I love my job less or love my out-of-work life more? I don’t really care, as long as I go through life with a (genuine) smile on my face.

Thanks for reading my chaotic flow of thoughts! ;)

Would like to see more of it on Medium? Do you have any comments or questions? Let me know!

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Anna Rys

Written by

Anna Rys

CEO @AnyMindApp; ex-CEO of @TurboTranslate; co-founder of @Smogathon. Living and loving the startup life :)

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