Would you give up your life for work?

Let me tell you the answer first, I don’t know.

The reason I was able to make such a decisive choice was not because I had achieved financial freedom, but because I had made a wrong choice and was repeatedly rubbed against the ground by life before I deeply understood that work and life should not be separated. It is an opposite relationship. What the two should seek is a balanced state that complements and promotes each other.

Thinking back to those days, I was also a young man who had just graduated and was full of longing for the future. In addition to my excellent performance in school, I was recommended by my mentor and successfully entered a vibrant technology company. Highest salary. At that time, I was full of enthusiasm and felt that as long as I worked hard enough, the whole world would make way for me. I would shine and create value for my work. Promotion and salary increase were not a dream, and a better life was waving to me in the not-too-distant future.

I entered the workplace with boundless energy and plunged into work. At that time, my job required frequent business trips to various refineries to collect refining device data, and then perform pattern recognition optimization calculations (equivalent to today's big data analysis), and then return to the refinery to ask the workers to implement according to my final results. In order to ensure that they If nothing goes wrong, I still need to be on-site to monitor the effect at all times and make adjustments immediately if there are any problems. In order to do my best in my work and increase output, I seldom took vacations during those two or three years. I was like a work machine without emotions. Even when I was off work, I was either studying data or doing necessary workplace entertainment. . At that time, I sacrificed more than just my personal life for work. I had no time to spend with my parents, my girlfriend, and my friends. It wasn’t until I attended a class reunion that I decided to change this situation.

My classmates, although no one had a higher salary than me when they graduated, when we met again in just two or three years, some of them had joined foreign companies, some had made a fortune by stock trading, and some had succeeded in starting a business. I am making rapid progress as an individual, but I am the only one who is taking steps back. My high-intensity work did not bring me the life I wanted, but made me look extremely tired.

After the critical attack at the class reunion, I felt that I should stop, rethink my life, and find a balance point for my life.

Looking back now, the problem I encountered at that time is obvious: I only saw the superficial benefits obtained from hard work, but ignored the long-term value of other parts of life that I gave up for these superficial benefits, and even more neglected To manage the value of time required for self-development.

Therefore, we do not have to make extreme choices about what is more important in life and work. Using time management to maintain a balance between them is a long-term feasible way.

Finally, after careful consideration, I chose to resign and join a 9-to-5 company, starting a new round of my struggle.

It’s just that this time I no longer choose to sacrifice life to achieve work, but use various methods of time management to improve my concentration, multiply my work efficiency, etc., to achieve a balance between work and state of life. Facts have proved that my choice opened up a new path for myself. In the past, I was like an ascetic practicing. I had to compress my life time in order to work, but the results were not satisfactory. It seemed that I had entered a vicious circle. The harder I worked, the more exhausted I became. Later, in order to have a better life, I tried my best to live as quickly as possible. By completing my work with high quality, I became proficient in time management skills and used this ability to push my career to one peak after another. In the end, I achieved financial freedom in the workplace and a happy life at the same time.

Therefore, we should not blindly let ourselves make choices between work and life. Wouldn't it be more perfect to find a way to go hand in hand?