X-aholic!

Every entrepreneur is warned that he has to let-go his personal life before he ventures out on his own. I never really bought into the fear of risk nor loosing your personal time. For I always believed that if you strived enough, you could still get time for your game of tennis in the morning, help your wife a bit (well, atleast you can pretend to help her!), find time to relax and yet work like there never is going to be tommorow!

I thought I maintained that balance quite well for a long time. But recently I realize I am getting addicted to work. I realize that I have not taken a single day off from work in a few months at a stretch now - no sundays, no festivals, no nothings!

I tried justifying it and rationalizing it. But my mind now is kind of stubborn and repeats a very tough question. Is it ok to be addicted to work?

Being a Workaholic - is that acceptable? How different is the lust for work different from lust for alcohol or women? Not very! An addiction is an addiction! Just that being workaholic is a little more culturally accepted norm and probably a little more respected compared to lusts of other categories!

If you go and ask a woman who smokes, she probably would shrug her shoulders and say .. hey you just dont belong to 'my culture'! That doesn't make smoking right - does it? I am not talking about just health reasons here - I am talking about it in a broader scheme of things and I think I would never encourage anyone to smoke. Now half my friends smoke, that doesnt make me hate them - but surely that does not make me approve of the act either!

Now, given my strong reservations against any kind of addiction, do I excuse myself from being addicted to work? I could not play for a month (ofcourse my knee is hurt - but thats an excuse only for a week), and I could not even spend much time with my wife who is carrying a 4 month year old baby! Why? Loads of work! Its not the time I spend at work that disturbs me - but the fact that I could not just leave it at office and it keeps constantly revolving in my mind... which earlier was never the case. But these days it scares me if I am getting addicted to work!

Being workaholic may be socially acceptable and in some cases even be laudable. But for me there are some universal, invariant principles which do not depend on interpretation of culture! And one such rule that I have been learning over the last few months has been not to get addicted to any damn thing in this world - NOTHING!

Can I walk away from anything in this world and not think about it for the second time if need be? Now that does not mean I want to avoid work and not contribute. I feel blessed to have been given the intelligence and energy levels to deliver and contribute in my own little ways to the people around me. And I will never retire into "not doing anything". I want to work with the same energy that I have now... but if need be, I want to be able to switch to ONLY the present.

If I am at home and I talk to my mother, I want to be present just there... not think about office emergencies! Perhaps I am getting there.. or so I thought!

But then I am not too sure how much progress I have made in that direction. Since I did not have a break from work in a few months, a couple of days ago, I called S and proposed that we go out for a long drive. He was ready. I had to break from work! I just had to! We drove around, spent some time in coffee day and off we were driving again. In the beautiful rain that lashed out, we were chatting till I realized it was 1:30 am! And I was about to head home after dropping him at his appartments. Thats when I realized the irony... that I ended up discussing the next expansion plans of my company and validating strategy, processes, pricing and what not with my classmate! The very thought scares me... am I that deeply addicted to work?

It scares me... But the only silver lining is that this has been only a recent phenomena. And since the symptoms have been diagnosed quite early, I hope to curb the addiction with a little more effort!