Health, Wealth, and Boundaries. Complete with fake IDs.

“We’re out of towels and I’m too old to go diving into lockers.” – Minor League

It would be nice to have Morgan Freeman narrate your life.  Except for after you did stupid stuff.  Or boring stuff.  Nevermind – skip that.

A number of years ago my boss called me at 11pm.  There had been an incident at work.  As it was a Thursday and I was planning on taking Friday off, The Mrs. and I had already consumed the better part of a bottle of wine.  I decided that I’d go to bed – certainly vacation was off.

In fact, I worked the next 45 days, straight.  I averaged at least 12 hours a day, every day.

During that time, we worked really hard.  Stressful situations daily.  New decisions daily.  But the team met all the goals that were set on that first day, and then some.   We even ended up at budget.  But 540 work hours in 1.5 months is about 225% of a typical work week (40 hours).

I break my time into a triangle:

1. Work – Ideally, work should server multiple purposes. It should put money in the bank and food on the table.  Another, very real purpose of work is to create value for society.  A well-run business generates wealth for the owner, sure.  But the jobs that it creates can generate wealth for a community.  And most businesses can’t stay in business unless they serve a need in the community.  A power generation plant has to make power to stay in business, but if it operates well and efficiently, it produces power at a low cost, which allows people to have the relative luxury of electricity cheaply, so they can read this blog, or watch Green Acres®.
2. Family – As a husband and father, taking care of my family is a primary responsibility – it means more than the money from work, it means being there to be dad – both as a bad example of the kind of dad you don’t want to have, as well as teaching children responsibility through situations that force them to figure things out. I mean, what 12 year old shouldn’t know how to make a fake id so he can buy smokes?
3. Personal Health – If I’m not healthy, I’ll die, and that makes it hard to shower consistently. Also, I won’t be able to lead my family, or work amazingly long hours.  Health may be its own reward, but it also supports the other two legs of the triangle.

I’d say “bad dog,” but I am out of beer . . . and thanks to practice and parental neglect, Pugsley makes a much better fake ID.

So during this 45 day period, a big stretch of the triangle was possible.  Heck, I was in the best shape I’d been in for at least six years.  Life was good.  I’d focus on work, but put my second focus on family.  Personal health can wait, right?

And during those 45 days, I didn’t exercise like normal.  Also, I don’t eat lunch (I hadn’t since fifth grade) and in those days just worked through lunch.  But we had team meetings (complete with lunch) pretty much every day.  It turns out I can gain 2 pounds a week just by eating lunch more than once.  Yeah.

So, forty five days later, we finished.  And we were exhausted.  And 45 days later?  I entered into yet another work death-march that lasted a year and a half.

Yeah, and that second death-march ended with 45 days straight, too.  And then time required for activities related to The Boy and Pugsley multiplied.  It seems like when the work demands went down, the family demands went up.  And I could safely ignore the health demands, right?

My take on this is that I’ve set my boundaries too far towards work in the past, but the bright side is all the hard work and family stuff seems to be paying off.

But it’s always (a bit) irritated me that Hollywood types get so buff.  I saw Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible 12 (or whatever) this last weekend, and it’s undeniable that the man is in great shape, not only for his age, but for any age.  Cruise was certainly in better shape than he was during his early movies.  He’s seven or eight years older than Simon Pegg, but manages to look ten years younger.  I guess maybe Scientology® might pay off, if you can deal with whole “completely made up” parts.

And Tom Cruise has a luxury that most of us don’t – he has the ability to spend 2,000 learning to fly helicopters so he could do it for this movie, plus countless thousands of hours of training.  I’m lucky to get 250 hours a year to myself for training.  And more power to Cruise!  But most people don’t have that option.  The iron triangle of work-family-health keeps showing up.

In the end that’s part of why I named the blog wilderwealthywise.com – it focuses on that triangle of important things in the average person’s life.  Wealth buys time, and time buys health.  And health . . . buys more time (on Earth).  And with health and time?  One would hope that you can end up with wealth.

And then you could have Morgan Freeman narrate . . . but hopefully not these lines:

It will all be worth it.  Now, back to the elliptical . . .