Hot Worms and Workaholics: Let the Workers Be!

"There's no proper balance for everyone's life, only a proper balance for each individual's life. Some of us can dedicate 70 percent of our lives to our work and be happy; for others doing so can be disastrous." The Butterfly Hunter by Chris Ballard

In a recent article "Creature Prefers Deadly Scorching Water" I learned of worms that live in water so hot that it would kill other worms.

This unusual preference for the scalding heat may be because of food, since these worms are the only animals that can get to lush carpets of bacteria flourishing around sizzling deep-sea vents.

We speculate that these worms have evolved to prefer and tolerate these temperatures because it allows them to graze on bacterial lawns that no other organism can access.

What would happen if some of the cooler worms (those in the luke-worm, cool-worm, and berg-worm ponds) decided that since hot water is fatal to them it is therefore bad for all worms? Reminds me of some of the arguments  and declarations we hear about work-life balance.

I have met many hot worm lawyers and I suspect there may be whole firms composed primarily of hot worms. These lawyers thrive on conditions that might prove injurious or even fatal to other lawyers. I am concerned for the hot worm lawyers and the damage that might be done to them if someone decided that these torrid wigglers needed to swim in cooler waters, to achieve life balance as defined by some other worm. In many cases, a cool, balanced worm may be an unhappy or dead worm. Lawyers come in a wide variety of temperaments, each with a unique, individual, ideal allocation of what and how much goes on each scale of life. That uniqueness is best respected for the sake of the lawyer, the firm, and the client.

Dr. Paul Pearsall in his The Beethoven Factor writes about how we tend to focus on the half-empty glass when we consider health risks.

Much of what keeps us alive or kills us remains a medical mystery. People who by all medical predictions should die young often don't, and those who it seems should not too often do. The answer to this paradox may rest in learning less about why we get sick and die and more about why we don't become ill and why we thrive.

I hear many "health terrorists" as Pearsall calls them discussing the legal profession and how lawyers need to achieve work-life balance. What is work-life balance? While the phrase is ubiquitous these days, there is a definitional void. Perhaps the lack of definition is due to the infinite number of responses one must give to this question in order to be accurate. Balance is a combination of many things -- personality, goals, values, interests, much more -- and in a composite, a blend, for each of us as unique as our genetic makeup or fingerprints.

For a hot worm, work-life balance may be very different from that of a berg worm. One size does not fit all and what may appear to one to be out of balance may be the ticket to surviving and thriving for another. Maybe we should be looking at the thriving lawyers, regardless of their behavior, to learn what factors are a part of resilience.

Health terrorists fail to look at "the other group" in their research. For example, researchers have shown that being overweight, not exercising, having high blood pressure, and smoking result in about a 30 percent chance  that we will die prematurely. They fail to ask about the other group, the 70 percent who despite engaging in these unwise behaviors don't die prematurely. This pathogenic view causes us not to see a healthy forest because we are too busy looking for diseased trees.

Are we looking through the same biased lenses when we look at the stress, balance, and health of the legal profession? "If all you have is a hammer everything starts to look like a nail." I hope that the advocates for cooler ponds will put down their hammers and watch closely the hot worms.  Some worms have deep and canny wisdom.

I would not enter on my list of friends
(Though graced with polish’d manners and fine sense,
Yet wanting sensibility) the man
Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm.
--William Cowper

Note (added December 9, 2006, 11:40 AM Mountain): Two more posts on this topic for you: Hot worms revisited: Extreme lawyers often love their work and Is this lawyer a workaholic? Let's look at the fun/fear factor instead.

Note (added June 28, 2009): Another post on this topic: Hot, cool and cold worms: A contrarian look at work-life balance and so-called "workaholism".

Comments

[Julie Fleming Brown]

Stephanie, thanks for directing me to this post. The hot worm analogy is a terrific one, and I think it's an underappreciated issue in the work/life balance conversation.

I agree with your points entirely. It seems to me that work/life balance has by common usage come to mean working less, when what I think it should mean instead is finding the individual's proper balance between work and life. That's certain to vary from person to person, and it's likely to vary over time, depending on what's going on in a lawyer's practice as well as her personal life.

Where it gets really difficult, I think, is when a cold worm lawyer (sounds like the punch line for a bad lawyer joke...) gets into a hot worm firm, vice versa, or when a firm of either kind presents itself as a one-size-fits-all firm but actually has cold or hot expectations.

I don't know the answers to work/life balance issues, but I agree with David Maister's idea that firms may be unable to offer a range of options for work intensity, that the ideal is to have firms composed of individuals with shared work intensity desires. That's why I call for more transparency in hiring rather than the pat (though appealing) promise of a range of options.

It's a difficult question, but fascinating. I look forward to reading more of your ideas on this!

[Jennifer]

I came here from David Maister. I'm not sure that I disagree, but I wanted to put in a word for the cool worms. I don't think the hot worms are in much danger at the moment. Most firms are happy to employ them and make things work for them.

The cool worms tend to be shuffled off into in-house teams, and treated with contempt. I suspect that they have more to add to the world than that.

Anyway, the metaphor is probably breaking down (particularly for a non-lawyer), but thanks for a great post.

[Young Guest]

How many hot worms have joyous marriages? How happy are their children?

I am in my mid-20s and met a number of children of "hot worms" in college. Children of the C-suite who got every material good their hearts desired, but felt that they never had daddy/mommy's love and therefore tried to fill the void with drugs, alcohol, eating disorders, psychiatrists, etc. I became close friends with a number of hot-worm offspring, and at first I envied their wealth...but after really getting to know them, I ended up with enormous pity for them.

Maybe, as you point out, terms like "balance" may be ambiguous for the hot worm professionals themselves, but I can assure you that their *children* have issues that are quite easy to identify. Go to any Ivy-League or elite campus and I guarantee you that the spoiled, empty, emotionally-needy children of hot-worms stand out like a sore thumb.

Perhaps this is why, as another article on the subject noted, many recent "Generation Y" graduates are eschewing this life, or demanding better. We are one of the first generations to have had the chance to have *both* parents as high achievers, and we've seen the results on our classmates and their families.

Good luck to you all.