A Willingness to Adjust Posted on December 3, 2007 Gary S. Sachs (bio) underscores the importance of making time for one's life outside of work.

I think there really is a need for balance in your life, not necessarily day-to-day or week-to-week balance. Not everything has to be the same. But there should be an understanding between you and your spouse, you and your colleagues, you and your friends, what the hard times are and what the demands might be on them as well as you, and a willingness to adjust when those situations change.

So if you’ve got a grant that’s going out next week, of course you’re really gonna have less time for your family. But you need to be explicit about when that’s going to change, and what you can do to maintain your part of the relationship, your part of the family burden. And if you don’t have some balance over the long term, this is an impossible task to just keep going.

The people I know who are the least happy with their careers are the ones who were dead serious, extraordinarily narrow focused. They did all the right things. They got the papers out. And they don’t have in the rest of their life much to show for it at all. Though they’ve been extremely successful in their careers, they’re the least happy people I know when they get to their late 40s and early 50s.

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