So I was spending a few minutes researching some other stuff and this article caught my eye:

http://blog.talentmgt.com/2012/08/20/the-work-life-balance-myth/

Amy Wrzesniewski is a professor at Yale who studies work patterns, and has identified what she calls “orientations,” or psychological motivations, toward work. They are three: Job (money), career(advancement, power, prestige), and calling (meaning, purpose and fulfillment). Not surprisingly, individuals with a calling orientation tend to have higher life and job satisfaction and miss fewer days of work, she found in her research.

Why? When your job is a calling – and if you are lucky, you are in such a job now or remember when you were – time flies by. There are times you don’t want to go home. The best part of the “work-life” balance equation is the work.

Basically what this boils down to is, “Do what you love, love what you do.”  When I was teaching at the local community college, I always told my students that my goal was to never work a day in my life.  Not that I would quit my job of course, but that as Confucius put it: “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

I think that I am fortunate in that I really do enjoy working with technology.  I spend my free-time setting up test servers in my home office.  Before I got married my dining room table held an entire server farm.  I always want to know about the latest technology and find myself attending SharePoint Saturdays and SoCal Code Camp on the weekends.

This even creeps into my hiring decisions.  One of my standard questions as a hiring manager is, “How did you first get into computers?”  Their answer and their attitude are one of my main factors in deciding between two qualified candidates.  Hint: saying you got into computers because you heard it was a good money is not the right answer!