Get Real With Yourself: Why do you keep working so hard?
6 questions to reflect on what's really important in life
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When you are in a high-demand job, constantly competing with ambitious coworkers and facing the systematic and familial pressures of achieving "success" — how do you slow down and re-evaluate?
We are thrilled to bring you today’s guest post by Jen Weigel, a recovering lawyer and current director of program management at Microsoft. In 2021, Jen nearly died from COVID. While not all the lessons from that experience have stuck, Jen shares 6 questions to help us all reflect on what’s truly important in life, and whether you’re using your limited time on earth to do the things that are most important to you:
Who are you apart from your work?
What are you working for?
What is actually important?
How often are you doing the most important things in your life today?
How can you take action to focus on those important things?
How are you going to hold yourself accountable?
Jen is a work in progress, constantly learning new things, and reflecting on what she learns. She’s passionate about sharing those lessons with others, teaching the Reframe Your Habits, Unlock Career Success course, and running a community for women focused on taking immediately actionable steps to continue to grow their careers.
Apply to be featured as a guest post: If you are an expert and want to share actionable career advice with our readers, get in touch.
I woke up on a Monday morning, my wrist swollen and inflamed from an animal bite I had gotten the day before. An online chat with a doctor confirmed that it was likely infected and that I needed to be treated as soon as possible. My calendar was packed; I was in the middle of hiring a new team and had the last phone screen for one of my open positions scheduled that morning, so I didn’t want to reschedule. But I quickly evaluated what could be canceled or reshuffled to later in the week, and cleared the rest of my calendar for the day so I could head to urgent care.
Later, when I was telling this story to a friend, noting how it was a good prioritization exercise to remind yourself what’s really important in your life, she looked at me and said, “Wasn’t it just three years ago that you were in a coma? How many signs does life need to give you?”
I froze.
She was right.
In April 2021, getting COVID-19 nearly killed me.
TL;DR: I ended up on a ventilator in the ICU in a medically induced coma for a week; followed by months of recovery, including learning how to breathe again. Few experience what it’s like to nearly die. But we all face the loss of loved ones, sometimes much too early, and rarely are we ready to face mortality.
Life is short.
We realize this as we age, but how many of us stop to truly reflect on what it means and then make changes to our lives instead of just letting life continue to happen to us?
Eight months into my recovery, I reflected on the experience, confident that I was on the way to making the most of some valuable life lessons. Surely I had survived so that I could evaluate what I had learned and re-prioritize my life. But even as I wrote a series of LinkedIn posts, I already saw that I was sliding back into old habits of busyness. I took a new job, cranked up the pressure to deliver, and had a new team relying on me to guide them and get things done for the business.
I had hoped putting it out in the world would help me create new habits.
But I still failed.
Mostly.
I tried to change too much at once. Only a few of the habits stuck – like actually taking a break for lunch every week day. (Some of you may think taking a lunch break is a given, others reading this may be nodding along knowing that you let meetings take over your lunch time.) Most of the commitments I made to myself in order to re-prioritize faded away as “busyness” creeped back into my life.
In a society that glorifies a hustle culture and often pins our identity to our careers, how do we really slow down and re-evaluate?
When we’re in high-demand jobs, surrounded by ambitious people, or up against familial pressures, how do we buck the systematic pressures of societally defined success without others looking down on us?
And, as if I need yet another sign that life is short, my 14-year-old dog was recently diagnosed with a leaky heart valve. None of us know how much time we have. So now, instead of rushing him through his daily walks, I’m making more time for him to sniff all the things. If that means I have to take a meeting on my phone instead of at my desk, I do it. I want him to live his best life for whatever time he has left.
Why shouldn’t I also want that for myself?
This leads to questions for all of us:
Can you honestly say you’re living your best life?
Do you even know what you think your best life is?
Time for some introspection
Read the rest of this post now so it gets you thinking, and in the next two days, grab 30 minutes and a quiet place where you can revisit to focus on these 6 questions:
Who are you apart from your work?
What are you working for?
What is actually important?
How often are you doing the most important things in your life today?
How can you take action to focus on those important things?
How are you going to hold yourself accountable?
That’s 5 minutes a question – the time will go faster than you realize.
If you don’t make the time for this in the next 2 days, you never will.
Question 1: Who are you apart from your work?
Think about the last time you introduced yourself to someone new.
Did your intro include your job title, the place you work, or the work you do? For many of us, it’s natural to wrap our identity around what we do. But why do we do that? We are so much more than our jobs and our careers. We have relationships and interests outside of work – let’s normalize talking about who we are apart from our work. Ask yourself: When you die, what do you want to be known for?
My example: I’m a builder — from teams and processes to skills, and even Lego, I love building new things. I enjoy teaching new things to others — whether it’s the skills I’m building or lessons from experiences I’ve had. When my nose isn’t stuck in a book, you’ll find me spending time with my dog and husband. We like to explore new places, from hiking in national forests to long urban walks to find new restaurants.
Question 2: What are you working for?
Once you’ve jotted down some ideas on what you want to be known for – who you are apart from a job title or role – now ask yourself what are you working for. The immediate answer for most is to be able to pay the bills and support our families. But what’s the end goal?
There’s a parable about a businessman and fisherman, often credited to German author Heinrich Theodor Böll. It goes like this:
A businessman is on vacation in a sleepy fishing village when he notices a fisherman coming ashore with quite a few big fish. He asks the fisherman how long it takes him to catch the fish. When the fisherman says only a short while, the businessman asks why he doesn’t stay out all day, catch more fish, buy more boats, and build a large company that he could eventually sell for millions and retire. Puzzled, the fisherman says, “Why would I do that?” The businessman replies, “Because once you retire you can move to a sleepy fishing village, spend a few hours in the morning catching fish, then return home to play with your kids, take a nap with your wife, and spend your evenings with friends, playing music and having fun throughout the night!” The fisherman replies, “But that’s already what I do.”
In the book “The Psychology of Money,” author Morgan Housel writes: “The highest form of wealth is the ability to wake up every morning and say “I can do whatever I want today. The ability to do what you want, when you want, with you you want, for as long as you want, is priceless.” Consider this, the fisherman, and stop and ask yourself – what are you working for? Write down all the reasons you work, and what you ultimately want to achieve.
My example: A few years ago, my answer would’ve been all about money to pay down my massive student loan debt, and save for retirement. Now that I’ve paid off most of my debt, I’m still saving for retirement, but I have more flexibility to do the work I want. I work for the intellectual challenge, and for money to pay for adventures that I can still physically do while I’m young enough. Ultimately, I want to make a difference in the lives of the people I manage, in the lives of our customers, and in the lives of the women I meet and mentor.
Question 3: What is actually important?
Now that you’ve thought about what you want to be known for and all the reasons you work, it’s time to ask yourself what is actually important. While it may seem like a morbid exercise, if you knew you only had 3 months left to live, how would you spend that time? Write it down. Play with that timeline a bit – would your answer change if it was 6 months or a year? What about 3 years? What if it was only a week? Does that change how you’d spend your limited time?
My example: I would spend the time taking the trip that I’ve been talking about for years, going to the show that I’ve always wanted to see, and trying the new restaurant I’ve heard great things about. I would teach someone the new Copilot prompt I discovered that’s been making my life easier.
Doing something for myself every day, even if it’s in the middle of the work day, has been an important step in connecting with what really matters to me. This may include taking the dog for a walk, or eating the “good” chocolate that I’m always saving for later. I’ve stopped saving so many things for “later” and started doing them now. I am doing what I want, not what I feel I should do because that’s what others expect of me.
Question 4: How often are you doing the most important things in your life today?
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