Midlife MavericksI spoke with Alda this week. She’s 48. We laughed ourselves stupid, on the phone, about the number of hours we both work. The joke was that we keep doing it because we want to. For the love of the game.
That expression stayed with me all week. “For the love of the game.” Work that feels worth running for. Work you want to be inside of, even halfway through the hours.
Ronaldo trains like a maniac and nobody in the street says “poor man.” Everyone gets it, even the people who can’t stand him, that he loves what he chose. Nobody tells Ronaldo to rest more. They tell that to people who work in call centres and come out in tears, or to people who put up with an unbearable boss for years.
There’s a distinction here that gets missed in most conversations about work. The assumption is that the problem is the volume. I strongly disagree.
I had another conversation this week with Margot. She’s 60, lives in a Canadian community where 90% of her friends are already retired. Spent her entire career in asset management. Ran top quartile funds through that decade many of us know well, the one where you bury your parents and raise your children. Today she sits on multiple public boards and has a consulting practice.
Margot was blunt about it: “I have control over my schedule.” Control over the calendar. Control over what she says yes to and what she says no to. And then this: “I only associate and do business with good people.”
Her friends think she works too much. I hear the same thing. This week an old colleague said it to me: “you’re still working like a dog.” He’s right. Margot too. Alda too. We come out of those calls with more energy than we came in with.
Margot capped it with this: “It doesn’t feel like work because I’m working with good people.” That’s it. Right there.
As Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, what keeps us alive is meaning. Same with work. What drains is the toxicity of the people around you. What drains is the sense of executing a life someone else picked for you. The energy comes from being exactly where you want to be, doing things that matter.
There’s work that exhausts you in three hours, and work that won’t exhaust you in forty hours straight. I’ve finished fifteen-hour days with more clarity than I had in the morning. I’ve also had weeks of perfectly reasonable hours where, by Sunday, I couldn’t hold a coffee cup steady.
The “why do you work so much?” question always starts from the wrong assumption: that working a lot is bad. The wrong work is bad. The volume is neutral. Working a lot at something you chose, with people you respect, is a way of living. It gives you vitality instead of taking it.
This lands harder when you get to where I’m standing. I turn 50 in September. I’m the class of ’76, like a lot of the women around me. We’re old enough to notice something. A friend of mine, younger than me, has cancer. I won’t say more about her. But the thought slips in sideways and stays. Making it to 50 is already luck. Making it to 50 still able to choose what’s inside the next hours is rare.
So when someone tells me I work too much, I smile. I’m quietly tasting the privilege of all of this. And realising that they probably have never felt what it is to love work enough to lose track of the hours passing.
It’s time to look at work differently. Look carefully at your week. Which hours of work gave you energy, and which drained you like a leech?
If more of them gave than took, you’re in luck. If more took, that’s useful information for the other half of your life.
Alda laughed until we were both out of breath. We picked a date for dinner. Dinner, obviously, with time to actually BE there, without running off to work afterwards. And then she went off to work, and I went off to my umpteenth Zoom call.
When you do what you love, you don’t tire.
Comment below. What’s draining you that isn’t the hours? I read every response.
This article was first published in Portuguese in my weekly column Oh pá, não me lixem! for Executiva.
