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CHAPTER 6 WORK‐LIFE BLEND

As work and life have blended, we need to be increasingly discerning in how we expend our energy. In the case of traditional workaholics who toil away as a diversion, engaged workaholics do so as an energiser. By working in intervals, cross‐training between domains, and adopting the right attitude–shapers seek to spiral up.

‘Sup buddy?’ Brian saunters into the cafe with a grin. On cue, I prep my fantastical coffee shake concoction complete with peanut butter cookie, a scoop (or two) of vanilla ice‐cream, a dose of chocolate syrup, and just the right amount of espresso. Oblivious to Brian's chatter, I'm dead set on making the best thing he's ever tasted. When he indulged in one of my wacky creations, which was all too frequently for one human, the twinkle in Brian's eyes grew brighter. Then I got fired.

As a teenager, this was my first proper job. A barista was the perfect position for me–I loved people and would soon grow to love coffee as well. I moved on to a myriad of other jobs: retail slave, warehouse packer, bartender, salesman, marketer, event organiser, designer, researcher, innovation guy, teacher, lecturer–you name it and I likely did, or at the very least tried it. For a hot minute I worked at a startup that was trying to take down Google. Big surprise, they went bust.

In all of these roles I was a segmentor: work was work and I got my kicks in life and satisfaction elsewhere. Segmentors keep the space between work and life wholly separate because having them bleed together feels unsettling.

In the fall of 2003, at the same time that the Concorde made its last supersonic flight, I started a business. I moved from a segmentor to a blender–and an entirely rubbish one at that. For the better part of a decade, I would direc all of my energy (and I had a tonnes of it) towards work. Indeed, work had become a container for my fear of failure and totally consumed me.

It took a while and a lot of practice, but I think that I'm a much better blender now. I strive to integrate work and life in such a fashion that the two are in harmony, often indistinguishable from one another. While the seamlessness can get tricky at times, it can also bring wholeheartedness. Diplomat, historian, and writer François‐René de Chateaubriand put it best:

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between their work and their play, their labour and their leisure, their mind and their body; their education and their recreation. They hardly know which is which. They simply pursue their vision of excellence through whatever they are doing, and leave others to determine whether they are working or playing. To themselves, they always appear to be doing both.

DO THE RIGHT THING

The workplace has become an abstract concept with a virtual set of relations. The office now lives in our pockets or purses. And what you do, rather than where you go, is what really matters. Eking out your waking hours so as to get the best results is what keeps you relevant.

If we are what we repeatedly do, then the question blenders ask is: ‘How can I best direct my energy today?’ The answer, it seems, isn't about doing things the right way–it's about doing the right thing.

Shapers are in effect masterful blenders. Instead of working around the clock, blenders layer work into life like expert Tetris players. With a war chest of resilience, they continually level up.

At the risk of sounding drunk on my own Kool‐Aid, I should clarify that the blend is about a distinct working style that blurs work and life in a purposeful way. It means moving fluidly between facets of work and life aligning your skills, interests, hobbies, and attitudes in such a fashion that you feel richer for it. Interestingly enough, the organisations that actively seek to blend work and personal time for their employees are actually better off in the long run.

Nearly half of the US professional workforce are independent workers. And we're now witnessing passionate job quitters and an entire gamut of flexible working arrangements help shape the Great Migration. With a tsunami of workers striking out on their own, there'll be more Tetris players than ever before.

While some take to the blend like a duck to water, it suits a certain skin better than others. And regardless of whether you fancy yourself a segmentor, blender, or a bit of both, what's important is that you set healthy boundaries for those things that matter most.

The new workforce is a young one. The advantage of being born after 1980 is being native to digital and only knowing our connected world (perhaps a drawback is never having possessed a pre‐internet brain). But millennials are too often confused with being entitled rather than networked. The opportunities afforded by the information and telecommunications revolution have given these future shapers a fresh worldview: working hard doesn't necessarily mean getting ahead, ergo, I might as well do what I love.

ENGAGED WORKAHOLISM

Stroll into any hipster coffee shop on the weekend, in any city, and barring a no Wi‐Fi policy you'll see heaps of conscientious folks on their laptops. Some may be students pretending to study, while others scrutinise cat videos–but I promise you, heaps of peeps are actually working. I'm one of them right now. ‘Poor souls’ some mutter under their breath; we can't enjoy our weekend and are forced to toil away on our devices. But poor souls, like rich pricks, are relative.

A tough day at the office was once counterbalanced with celebrating (often called drinking) or forgetting (dubbed television). Weekends were 100% sacred time to do anything but work. Shapers often choose to work weekends professing they do their best work while the rest of the working world, well, rests. They take a wholly unique attitude and approach, because work and play are often indistinguishable.

Still sceptical and think the blend is simply masquerading as workaholism? To shed some light on the matter it's helpful to distinguish between a workaholic (an avoidant behaviour) and an engaged workaholic (a deliberate behaviour). At the age of 28, Adam Grant became the youngest full professor at Wharton, having written over 60 peer reviewed publications and a bestselling book. His colleague Nancy Rothbard says Grant's love affair with work isn't a bad thing and doesn't guarantee burnout. An expert on the boundaries between work and life, Rothbard explains that when we find meaning in our work–seeing it as a joyous endeavour–we don't necessarily need to recover like ‘unhappy workaholics’. Workaholics, the disenchanted kind, are obsessed with their jobs but don't actually like them. Work functions as a diversion.

For many, busyness has become a proxy for productivity reinforced by the always‐on diet. At time of writing, a 31‐year‐old Tokyo based journalist clocked 159 hours of overtime in a month. Soon thereafter she died of a heart failure. Japanese authorities declared it death by karoshi. The karoshi phenomenon was commonplace in that country's bubble economy in the 1980s and has since, rather regretfully, normalised death by overworking. Western doctors call it civilisation's disease–a nod to the toxic ways some lead their lives.

This trend epitomises what German philosopher Joseph Pieper called total work–when humans become workers and nothing else. Our careers become the centre of our lives, and the totality of work takes up not just all of our time but also all of the real estate in our brains.

To be sure, there is a big difference between a shaper and a hustler. Working around the clock and wearing an ‘always‐on’ badge with pride is the mark of a hustler. There's no time to ‘turn off’ when you're so ‘turned on’ the hustler claims. The anxiety surrounding failure is so pronounced, the default mode is simply to work harder. It's a slippery slope from finding yourself in work to having work consume you. The saner strategy of the shaper is to intentionally funnel the working spirit–toiling in bursts followed by rest and reflection.

NETWORK OF ENTERPRISES

Just as work and life are blending, so too are disciplines and industries. Is Google a search engine, advertising company or artificial intelligence company? Is Facebook a social network or political lobbyist? To be frank I don't actually know, and I'm not entirely sure it matters. What I do know is that the ability to move between and match up disciplines will be a need‐to‐have quality for shapers. Instead of relying on arbitrary job titles, a diverse intersection of talents will be assembled for a given project. We'll need to slip seamlessly among creative, experimental, risky, emotive, collaborative, analytical, and networked mindsets and functions.

In a study of operatic composers, psychologist Dean Keith Simonton found that the most successful composers blend genres. Instead of focusing on a particular genre of opera, the most successful composers cross‐train, pulling from a rich mix of genres. Certainly, a deep expertise is always a good foundation, but we can be wary of getting too engrained in a particular field. We must widen our vision to ensure our peripheral gaze is popping.

In another instance, excessive schooling impaired creativity in writers who received a lot of formal education. At some stage they just had to make the jump and get on with it. Getting fit for a creative pursuit may best be achieved by shifting between broad interests and disparate fields. The real trick is knowing when and how to move fluidly between them.

Innovation expert Frans Johansson explains that it's a diversity of perspectives that truly drives innovation. So a helpful practice for shapers is to operate on the threshold–in between disciplines. It's in the antidisciplinary space, where a certain field is yet to exist, that the magic happens. Say, for example, where sociology and psychology marry–and voila! You have social psychology.

With more colourful thinking, we're more open to what psychologist Howard Gruber calls a ‘network of enterprises’. Instead of a narrow focus on one question or domain, we cross‐train to stay malleable. No joke: my orthodontist was also an extraordinary jeweller.

Like Simone de Beauvoir or Leonardo da Vinci, we obsess about lots of things and might pursue a series of loosely connected ideas, questions, and projects at the same time. Too much expertise can actually be detrimental to creative greatness. We've all heard the expression of not seeing the forest for the trees.

The reality of your place in work (and work's fit into your life for that matter) is ultimately determined by how you choose to see it. With the vantage of time, you can see yourself persisting (and perhaps prospering) into the future.

Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl knew all too well that the only things keeping him (and his fellow prisoners in the concentration camps) alive was the yearning to be reunited with loved ones and/or the opportunity to put creative works into the world. Our thoughts shape our reality and no matter what the circumstances, we can adopt whatever attitude we choose.

We turn our attention now to the modalities of work that are more becoming to the shaper life and the wired world we live in. At the frontier of the future of the work movement, we'll consider why dynamic teams and adaptive organisations do what they do so well. And we'll start to reveal that it's how we organise and work that requires constant experimentation. The overarching aim is for us to serve up the absolute best taco we got.