One of the most important questions anyone has to answer is the question of why? Why am I working? Why work so hard all year round? I think the answer for about 90% of us is in order to earn free time.
Paul Graham thinks of Entrepreneurship as a way of compressing your entire work life into a few years so that you can spend the rest of your life the way only few people can. People who work so hard in their early life and hit the gold jackpot do not need to work again for another day of their life.
This is why it is important to work hard, really hard. If I work hard now, I earn the rights to relax later without fear of poverty and lack catching up with me. The reason we work hard is so that we can get a chance to hang out with our friends, a chance to be around and raise our kids the right way.
We must never become so immersed in the work that we fail to take time off to rest and enjoy ourself. Resting from our labours is very important. The workaholics amongst us need to learn that it is not all about the work. We are simply running businesses, building startups, and executing various projects, we are not insane!
So, let us take our minds off work, relax and enjoy the day (and the season too). These days thanks to the trends of mobility and cloud computing, your work files are probably just a click away and the temptation to quickly check out the work and make some input is high. But you really should try to truly take time off.
Do not deny the people around you your presence by hugging your devices close to your chest; firing off emails, doing a mini work related research on Google, chatting with co-workers about work or quickly writing a few lines of code.
The reason we work so hard is in order to earn our free time. When we lose track of this fact, we start becoming quite inhuman.
Merry Christmas!
