Shopify President Says Work-Life Balance Is Unrealistic. Here’s What to Aspire to Instead.
Shopify President Harley Finkelstein says “balance” is the wrong word.
Key Takeaways
- Harley Finkelstein is the president of Shopify, an ecommerce platform valued at over $210 billion.
- In a new interview, Finkelstein said that workers should aspire to work-life “harmony,” not work-life balance.
- Finkelstein’s word choice echoes the viewpoint of other leaders, like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Work-life balance may be unrealistic, but employees can aspire to work-life “harmony” instead, says Shopify president Harley Finkelstein.
On a recent episode of the Aspire podcast, which aired last week, Finkelstein, who leads the ecommerce platform valued at over $210 billion, called work-life balance a “misnomer.”
“I think actually what we’re all searching for is some sort of harmony,” he said. “There are some Saturdays where I have to work, and there are some Thursday afternoons that I go for a walk with my wife. That’s my version of harmony.”
Work-life balance implies a fixed, even split between work and personal life, which rarely matches how jobs actually work. In Finkelstein’s view, harmony means accepting that some periods lean heavily toward work and others toward life, as long as the overall rhythm feels sustainable.
Finkelstein said that work-life harmony can look different depending on the stage of life. For example, before marriage and kids, he noted that he could work 80-hour weeks. That kind of schedule became impossible when he had children.
“When I had newborns, I wasn’t able to work 80 hours,” he said. “I think everyone needs to find their own version of it.”
Finkelstein said you don’t necessarily have to put in 80-hour weeks to be a top performer. He said some of the “greatest performers ever” only work 40 hours a week, but are “incredibly efficient with their time.” In Finkelstein’s view, harmony is more about effectiveness than sheer number of hours.
Related: These Companies Offer the Best Work-Life Balance, According to Employees
Other leaders, like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, have voiced similar ideas. Nadella said that instead of separating work and life, he likes to think about the equation as “work-life harmony.” He focuses on aligning what he cares about with his work, so that each part of life energizes the other.
“What I’m trying to do is harmonize what I deeply care about, my deep interests, with my work,” Nadella told the Australian Financial Review in November 2019.
Meanwhile, Bezos said in an April 2018 interview that he prefers the word “harmony” to the word “balance” because “balance tends to imply a strict tradeoff.”
“It actually is a circle; it’s not a balance,” he said. He added in an interview with Thrive Global that being happy and energized in one domain positively reinforces the other.
Related: This Is Where Microsoft CEO ‘Learns the Most’ — and It’s Not in Meetings
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Key Takeaways
- Harley Finkelstein is the president of Shopify, an ecommerce platform valued at over $210 billion.
- In a new interview, Finkelstein said that workers should aspire to work-life “harmony,” not work-life balance.
- Finkelstein’s word choice echoes the viewpoint of other leaders, like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Work-life balance may be unrealistic, but employees can aspire to work-life “harmony” instead, says Shopify president Harley Finkelstein.
On a recent episode of the Aspire podcast, which aired last week, Finkelstein, who leads the ecommerce platform valued at over $210 billion, called work-life balance a “misnomer.”
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