CHAPTER 5

Career Myopia and Other
Misperceptions

Recently I read an article about how myopia in children is growing at an alarming rate. Myopia is a structural problem that develops in the eye and causes objects in close proximity to appear clear while those in the distance appear blurry, commonly known as nearsightedness. According to this article, a growing number of children are developing myopia because of their constant use of computers and other electronic gadgets that require focusing on objects at a close range, while their distance vision, which is used in activities such as outdoor play, is diminishing.¹ The facts of the article are alarming for parents of young children, but the story also seems to be a great metaphor for something that I call career myopia.

Career Myopia: Putting Work in Perspective

If you didn’t already know, American workers suffer from career myopia, which is a loss of function in our imagination resulting from an inordinate amount of time spent focusing on our work life. We lose the ability to even visualize the big picture for lack of exercising those muscles in our imagination. As a result, our field of vision narrows, and the big picture becomes fuzzy. We lose sight of our dreams and instead fixate on merely surviving instead of thriving.

If you don’t believe me, just watch an episode of NBC’s hit show The Office. The sitcom is incredibly popular because it allows millions of viewers each week to commiserate about the drudgery of work. There are the incompetent annoying boss and the quirky employees, the pointless meetings, and the endless infighting and mindless gossip that must be endured in the workplace setting for at least forty hours each week. We laugh at the program because it is a cathartic release. But instead of laughing at the drudgery that we commit ourselves to day in and day out, we should be asking ourselves an important question: Why? Why do we all so readily accept this as the only way to spend the prime days of our lives? The answer is simple: We do so because we must—or so we think.

Aside from a few career renegades, we are conditioned to accept this situation as our way of life; mind-numbing work that dominates our days is the norm. Don’t get me wrong; work matters, but the bigger picture matters more! So often it takes a life-changing crisis to put things in perspective, but I beg of you, don’t wait for a crisis. Create your own wake-up call. Remind yourself of the big picture—life—and put work into proper perspective. Let’s do that right now.

How Long You Live and Work

Let’s take a look at work relative to the proverbial big picture. Here are some sobering statistics:

The average life cycle for someone born in 1970 is 70 years,² or 25,550 days.

The average career life cycle is 30 years, or 7,200 work days.

That means you work for approximately 43 percent of your life!

Unfortunately, that’s a best-case scenario—most people work longer than 30 years. If you begin working when you are 20 years old, for example, retiring 30 years later (at age 50) would mean that you would be ineligible for full Social Security benefits for another 17 years and would need to have saved enough money to live for presumably many more decades. Therefore, most people do not retire until they can draw all or most of their Social Security benefits. So let’s look at the realistic scenario:

A typical career life cycle is 47 years (an average career life cycle of 30 years plus 17 additional years to qualify for Social Security benefits), or 11,280 work days.

That means you would work for approximately 67 percent of your life!

Of course the typical worker then would collect full benefits at age 67 and die 3 years or 1,095 days later at age 70, according to U.S. Government life expectancy data.

How Much You Really Live During Your Working Career

Perhaps the statistics about how much Americans work are not surprising to you. After all, the numbers reflect what we have all come to accept as our shared reality. We work—a lot. Perhaps not as much as people in a few other countries, but we certainly don’t lead the charts in terms of how much we truly “live” either.

So, how much do Americans actually “live” during their working careers? How many days are spent away from workplace responsibilities and instead are dedicated to leisurely pursuits? In other words, how much time does the typical American lifestyle allow for what truly matters? Let’s answer those questions by taking a look at the facts:

The average worker has 16 days of paid holiday and vacation leave each year of their career³ to pursue their wildest dreams, which is 752 days total over the course of 47 years of work.

However, the average worker voluntarily relinquishes 4 of the 16 days of paid leave each year because they feel that there is too much work to do, that the company could not function without them, or that a leave of absence may jeopardize their job. The loss of these 4 days each year subtracts 25 percent from the total amount of paid leave that workers take over the course of their lifetime, bringing the total number of vacation days in a lifetime to 564 days.⁴

Because 6 of these 12 days off each year are holidays, as opposed to flexible time off, only 6 of the remaining days of each year are actual at-will vacation days.

Those 6 days multiplied by 47 years of service brings the grand total of at-will leave for a lifetime to 282 days, or approximately 9 months. (In fairness, however, the average worker does have an additional three full years after retirement but before death to pursue their passion for travel and leisure, if their health and finances allow for it.)

So the average American worker spends a total of 9 months between the ages of 20 and 67 enjoying freedom that is otherwise only associated with weekends or unimaginable wealth.

However, that data appears to be changing, according to a study in a recent issue of Harvard Business Review which found that “47 percent of Boomers—whose median age is currently 54—see themselves as mid-career,”⁵ due in part to financial losses associated with poorly performing investments and other important factors that resulted from a significant decline in the U.S. economy. This study seems to imply that working until one is physically unable to is what about half of Boomers expect to do. In fact, Sun Life Financial maintains something called the Unretirement Index, which tracks the number of people who continue to work after becoming eligible for full retirement benefits. Sun found that record numbers of Americans past age 67 plan to work full time out of uncertainty about their investments and current economic necessity.⁶

How depressing. Is that really what you want for your life? A work-until-you-die mentality? Is that the example you really want to model for your children to follow as they grow older? America, what are we doing with our lives? Well, before I get too carried away, let me mention that Americans are neither the only nor the biggest offenders of the work-before-life mindset.

How the World Works

If you think Americans work a lot, take a look at the following chart, which shows the findings from a comparative survey of the work year in thirty countries. The broad brushstrokes of the findings seem to demonstrate that while the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Korea, and Poland are seemingly above average when it comes to the number of hours workers spend on the job each year, the countries of France, Germany, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden are well below it. Korea stands out as the country with the most demanding work year by far.

Employees living in countries with a relatively shorter work year clocked approximately 1,400 hours each year, while those living in countries on the other end of the spectrum clocked closer to 2,000 hours. Korea has the absolute longest work year, with employees working 2,316 hours each year, or 46.6 hours weekly. Canada claims the title of “exactly average” at 1,736 hours, and the United States comes within range at 1,794 total hours.

These statistics look at the work year, but how about zooming in for a closer look at the work week? How many hours do employees in other countries clock each week on average? Although the Netherlands can boast a light schedule of just 30-hour weeks, the worldwide average is just over 38, which again places the 40-hour American work week well within range and amounts to a seemingly reasonable amount of time dedicated to laboring.

Source: OECD Factbook 2009.⁷

Now if we were all living in Korea and working their 46-hour weeks, perhaps we would have reason to protest, but alas—little did you know that your work schedule was so luxurious comparatively!

So how about the average work day in comparison to other countries around the world? We of course withstand the 9-to-5 work day in our American society. However, consider this excerpt from Forbes, which provides a snapshot of the average day in a Korean worker’s life:

If you thought you worked long hours, consider 39-year-old Lee from South Korea. A civil servant at the ministry of agriculture and fisheries, Lee gets up at 5:30 a.m. every day, gets dressed, and makes a two-hour commute into Seoul to start work at 8:30 a.m. After sitting at a computer for most of the day, Lee typically gets out the door at 9 p.m., or even later.

By the time he gets home, it’s just a matter of jumping in the shower and collapsing into bed before starting the whole routine all over again about four hours later. This happens six days a week and throughout almost all of the year, as Lee gets just three days of vacation. That’s right. Three days.

And did we mention Lee has a wife and three teenage kids? “I get to see them for 10 or 15 minutes a week, and then just on the weekend,” he says of his children before adding that, on weekends, he usually gets interrupted to go to the office.⁸

Unbelievably, because work is ingrained so deeply in Korean society, its citizens are willing to clock 600 more work hours each year than employees in the United States.⁹ Therefore, it is not surprising that both Korea and the United States, incidentally, never make it onto the Forbes’ list of countries with the happiest citizens. Those countries that consistently do—Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands—are also those countries either with the shortest work year or among the shortest.¹⁰ But less work is not always an indicator of happiness in and of itself, as any unemployed person can tell you. In fact, unemployment results in a significantly lower level of happiness as many scientific studies have proven, pointlessly I imagine.

So where are we then? We know that we want to be somewhere on the employment spectrum between unemployed and overworked. However, Americans are not slaving away in comparison to workers in some other countries, and yet still we feel consumed by our 9-to-5 lifestyle. What is the missing link? The answer: freedom.

The No-Vacation Nation

Ironically, in a country like America where freedom is a word that resonates so strongly with its citizens, freedom is the very thing lacking in the 9-to-5 lifestyle. The big, unattainable dream for most of us is having the freedom to enjoy more time away from work to pursue leisure activities without jeopardizing our employment. Certainly we Americans are jealous of our European counterparts who are well known for long and leisurely periods of vacation that can total as much as six weeks of additional time off each year. To us, that amount of vacation time seems beyond our imagination; instead, we trudge along and await our six days of at-will vacation leave each year. In fact, America is what one study called a no-vacation nation relative to the rest of the world; here is an excerpt from that enlightening report:

The United States is the only advanced economy in the world that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation. European countries establish legal rights to at least 20 days of paid vacation per year, with legal requirement of 25 and even 30 or more days in some countries. Australia and New Zealand both require employers to grant at least 20 vacation days per year; Canada and Japan mandate at least 10 paid days off. The gap between paid time off in the United States and the rest of the world is even larger if we include legally mandated paid holidays, where the United States offers none, but most of the rest of the world’s rich countries offer between 5 and 13 paid holidays per year. In the absence of government standards, almost one in four Americans have no paid vacation and no paid holidays.¹¹

Now consider the reality that few Americans are fully aware of: We have a much different opinion about taking time off than many other countries in the world. Perhaps it hearkens back to the Industrial Revolution, but whatever the origin we are certainly behind the curve. In fact, we’re off the charts, as shown in the following chart:

Source: No Vacation Nation. Rebecca Ray and John Schmitt. May 2007. CEPR: Center for Economic and Policy Research.

American workers are not legally guaranteed any paid vacation by law, unlike nearly every other modern economy on Earth. Zero. Despite the fact that our quality of life is most certainly connected with this coveted time off because it allows us the opportunity to pursue our interests, strengthen social bonds with our family and friends, and focus on personal development and identity formation separate from our work.¹² Somehow we Americans fit all of this into our six days of vacation a year. Or do we? As a nation we are most certainly not awash in happiness according to any number of polls and studies. The reasons are varied and complex, but one of the key factors to happiness that we so obviously lack in our 9-to-5 lifestyle is this freedom, or personal control, that leads to empowerment, which results in better coping skills and living more happily overall.¹³

The Deliberate Lifestyle

Are you thinking to yourself, “But what is the alternative? After all, I do have to earn a living.” And to that I say, “Thank you for asking!” The alternative to your current 9-to-5 reality is deliberately designing your lifestyle, beginning with customized work weeks that ultimately create a made-to-order work year.

Would you like more than nine months off during the course of your lifetime? Of course you would! Okay then, how much exactly? What is the magic number? What number would make you feel free? What number would make you feel wealthy, rich with time? I urge you to give this some serious thought because ultimately that is the time you allot to really “live” your life. The amount of time you dedicate to work versus the amount of time you dedicate to leisure determines your overall so-called work-life balance, or lack thereof. How many weeks of vacation time in a calendar year would make you feel like you were able to really “live” your life? Seriously, think about it for a moment and write that number here:

_______________ weeks of vacation each year

For me the magic number is 18. On average I take 18 weeks of vacation each year—and by the way, business is still booming. My career is undeniably on track and clients are clamoring to get me onto new projects even with the knowledge that I have a limited schedule of availability.

Contrary to popular belief, an organization can live without an employee for long periods of time, and the employee can enjoy job security in the interim if the expectations are clearly defined from the beginning. Also, my business has the potential for increase because, should there be a year when money is more important to me than free time, I can choose to open up additional days or weeks on my calendar.

But before we venture from our discussion about vacation time in order to escape work, let’s spend a moment discussing vacation time specifically intended to improve our work that once was reserved for only a select few in American society but need not be anymore.

The Power of Time Off

The famous designer Stefan Sagmeister has deeply held beliefs about the power of taking time away from work to do what he calls “experiment” with new ideas, explore, and create. Every seven years he closes his high-profile studio in New York City for one full year in order to reignite his creative energy. In a talk he gave for TED Talks called “The Power of Time Off,” Sagmeister explained that he initiated this year-long sabbatical idea after noticing that all his company’s design ideas were beginning to look the same, for lack of creative rejuvenation.¹⁴ He thinks about these periods of time off in a way that may provide a helpful new perspective for you as well, as you begin to entertain either a subtle or radical shift from your 9-to-5 mindset to a lifestyle by design.

Sagmeister’s rationalization for taking time off is that it is simply borrowed time, a few years of retirement taken earlier in life in small segments. He essentially takes five years of his anticipated retirement and “intersperses” them, as he says, back into his working years to the benefit of his company and society at large. The illustration in his presentation was represented like this:¹⁵

At first glance, in the preceding interspersed retirement model, the amount of time spent working appears to have lengthened whereas the amount of time in retirement appears to have been reduced. However, upon careful inspection, the color coding indicates that the amount of time spent in each category is exactly the same—only the sequence has been rearranged. It’s a little bit of retirement right now (every seven years).

Is this a radical idea from which only an artist can benefit? No. Both 3M and Google allow their design engineers to take time off to pursue their own interests, and it pays off! Both Scotch Tape and Post-it Notes were the result of projects pursued by 3M employees during this free time.¹⁶ Also, Google’s Innovation Time Off policy for engineers encourages them to take one day off each week “so that they’re free to work on what they’re really passionate about,” which has resulted in wonderful new ideas like Orkut and RechargeIt.¹⁷

One engineering manager at Google told ABC News that the “20 percent time,” as it’s called colloquially, gives people new freedoms for creativity. He said, “People who are given free time to think, without pressure, often see further down the road, because they’re not focused on today’s immediate problems. They can be more visionary.” Also, the engineering manager points out, “When you’re passionate about something and it’s an idea you believe in, you’re bound to work harder on it,” and as a result, “just about all the good ideas here at Google have bubbled up from 20 percent time, or something like 20 percent time, where people have their own idea and run with it.”¹⁸

Both 3M and Google do something similar to what Sagmeister, Inc., does, which is provide free time for creative thinking as a regular part of the employee’s career cycle with the company. As you consider designing your own career lifestyle, consider the benefit of building in a regular period of time off in order to recharge and rejuvenate. Although you may think that you cannot afford to take any time off, perhaps that is the very key to your next breakthrough. Still, these examples are very counterculture. The idea of regular time off seems reserved only for a radical few corporations, but this is a misperception. Many organizations and professions revere the idea of time off and have done so for generations.

In academia, for example, the idea of taking a sabbatical is a long-held tradition among tenured professors who may request an extended leave of absence approximately every seven years in order to work on a project of interest to them, such as writing a book. However, the goal of this time off isn’t “accomplishing”; instead, it is simply a time of resting the body, mind, and spirit, or “ceasing,” the literal translation of the Latin sabbaticus.

This concept is also represented in other ancient cultures, including the Greek sabbatikos and Hebrew Shabbat. In Judaism there is a great deal of reference to sabbatical including the sabbatical year, a period of rest for the land from planting every seven years, and Jubilee, which celebrated a sevenfoldseven cycle whereby the seven years of rest had been observed seven times over a period of fifty years. This period of Jubilee was a time when all land was returned to its ancestral owners and Hebrew slaves who had chosen to remain in service after the biblical six-year maximum were released.¹⁹

What’s my point? The point is that from the very beginning of time, taking regular periods of rest has been not only recommended but also required for the good of the people, nature, and the goods that were produced. The one holdover today that we enjoy from the biblical Shabbat refers to Sabbath, “a weekly period of rest,” and is in fact the origin of the modern-day weekend that we all know and love.²⁰

Time and Money in Abundance

You may be thinking that this is all well and good for a famous designer or a professor on paid leave who can afford to take long periods of time off, but what about the average person? This circles back to the big picture idea that is so troubling for the myopic masses. The question about taking time off is not, “Can you do it?” but instead, “What is holding you back from it?” The answer for most people is twofold: time and money.

As this book illustrates in the chapters ahead, you absolutely can enjoy regular periods of rest and relaxation as part of an entrepreneurial career model called the Patchwork Principle. We’ll get to the business of earning and working in the second half of the book, but for now let me give you a preview: You can have time and money—both in abundance. When you are the boss and fully design your own work year, you can take a very short or a lengthy period of time off, based on your priorities. A leave of absence can be something as short as a few hours scheduled into your day to brainstorm or daydream, a day off to bike across the city, or a week off to attend a seminar series.

The 9-to-5 Cure begins with remedying your career myopia by focusing on the big picture and then diving into the Patchwork Principle, which is a business strategy that helps you find work that you enjoy in abundance. Are you ready to dive in and start developing a blueprint for your new life? Here we go!

Endnotes

¹ Los Angeles Times, “Booster Shots,” December 14, 2009, blog, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/booster_shots/2009/12/myopia-nearsightedness-trends.html (accessed September 1, 2010).

² U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics Report, “Expectation of Life at Birth,” www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2010/tables/10s0102.pdf (accessed January 5, 2010).

³ Stephanie Rosenbloom, “Please Don’t Make Me Go on Vacation,” New York Times, August 10, 2006, www.nytimes.com/2006/08/10/fashion/10vacation.html (accessed September 1, 2010).

⁴ Kathy Gurchiek, “U.S. Workers Continue to Leave Vacation Unused,” HRMagazine, August 1, 2006, www.allbusiness.com/sector-92-public-administration/administration-human/1191833-1.html (accessed September 1, 2010).

⁵ Sylvia Ann Hewlett, “Reward Older Workers with What They Really Want,” Harvard Business Review, September 4, 2009, blog http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/hewlett/2009/09/salute_your_older_workers_this.html (accessed September 1, 2010).

⁶ Sun Life Financial, January 20, 2009, www.sunlife.com/us/v/.

⁷ OECD, “Economic, Environmental and Social Statistics,” OECD Factbook 2009, www.sourceoecd.org/vl=1390616/cl=17/nw=1/rpsv/factbook/06/03/02/06-03-02-g1.htm (accessed September 1, 2010).

⁸ Parmy Olsen, “The World’s Hardest-Working Countries,” Forbes, May 21, 2008, www.forbes.com/2008/05/21/labor-market-workforce-lead-citizen-cx_po_0521countries.html (accessed September 1, 2010).

⁹ Wikipedia, s.v. “Working Time,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#South_Korea_and_Japan (accessed September 1, 2010).

¹⁰ Lauren Sherman, “World’s Happiest Places,” Forbes, May 5, 2009, www.forbes.com/2009/05/05/world-happiest-places-lifestyle-travel-world-happiest.html (accessed September 1, 2010).

¹¹ Rebecca Ray and John Schmitt, “No Vacation Nation,” CEPR: Center for Economic and Policy Research (May 2007), report, 2, www.cepr.net/documents/publications/NoVacationNation_asofSeptember07.pdf (accessed September 2, 2010).

¹² Greg Richards, “Vacations and the Quality of Life: Patterns and Structures,” Journal of Business Research 44, no. 3 (March 1999): 189–198.

¹³ David Myers and Ed Diener, “Who Is Happy?” Psychological Science 6 no. 1 (January 1995): 10.

¹⁴ Stefan Sagmeister, “The Power of Time Off,” TED Conferences, October 2009, www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNuOmTQdFjA (accessed September 2, 2010).

¹⁵ Stefan Sagmeister.

¹⁶ Stefan Sagmeister.

¹⁷ Google, “The Engineer’s Life at Google,” www.google.com/jobs/lifeatgoogle/englife (accessed September 2, 2010).

¹⁸ Erin Hayes, “Google’s 20 Percent Factor,” ABC News, May 12, 2008, television interview, http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=4839327&page=1 (accessed September 2, 2010).

¹⁹ Answers.com, s.v. “Sabbatical Year,” www.answers.com/topic/sabbatical-year (accessed September 2, 2010).

²⁰ Wikipedia, s.v. “Shabbat (Talmud),” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabbat_(Talmud) (accessed September 2, 2010).