Happy Family, Successful Start-up. Impossible?

I quit my desk job 4.5 years ago. Worked at home up until last month. In that time I've had two kids (eldest now 3) and every day of their lives so far they've had both parents at home with them. I work weird hours, sometimes starting early, some times finishing late....all just depends on what needs doing. The 3 hrs I'd ordinarily spend commuting, I spend with my kids.

Now things are a little different. We have a startup with actual employees and that means office time. It's much harder now, but it's really just the commute and the time away that is difficult.

Like any job, it's up to you to balance your life how you see fit. Being your own boss at the very least gives you flexibility you'll never see in a desk job. So I think startups are perfect for work/life balance.

Chookaszian has chosen work and family. By all accounts, he has been very successful professionally and the stories he recounts about his family, casually woven into almost every conversation I've had with him, I am lead to believe that he has also managed to maintain great relationships with his wife and children.

In order to pursue successful and meaningful work and family lives, he had to give up his personal interests. As a young man he loved working on cars. He got a great deal of enjoyment out of fixing up old Porshes. About 30 years ago he purchased a Porshe that needed an engine rebuild. He took the engine out of the car and began working on it. Meanwhile, he got married and had children. Where is that engine today? It sits, neglected, in the same place and condition that he left it in 30 years ago. "I now know that engine will still be sitting there long after I am gone," he quipped.

In that same conversation, he also made another keen observation: "When someone says that they want 'work/life balance,' what they really mean is that they don't want to be in an executive position." For CEOs of successful companies, there isn't such thing as work/life balance. If you want that balance, you can be successful in middle management, but only those who are truly passionate and dedicated to their work make successful CEOs.

To illustrate the point, he mentioned a recent email he received from the CEO of a company. Chookaszian is a director on the board of the firm, and the company was dealing with a crisis. The CEO wanted to let him know that he would be out of town for about a week on vacation. The notion that someone would follow through with vacation plans in the midst of a company crisis was, in his view, absurd. "As a director, when I heard news of the company crisis, I cut short my ski trip with my wife and flew home on the next flight in order to deal with the issue." If the CEO felt that his vacation plans superseded his obligations as a CEO, it wasn't likely that he would have a job to come back to after his trip.

This doesn't mean that you can't have a solid relationship with your family. However, success in business requires that you first fulfill your obligation to the company and its constituents. That duty will require sacrifice. It will require long hours at the office, vacations cut short, and kids' soccer games missed. When there is a critical decision to be made at the company, that must come first. The additional difficulty in the start-up context is that, in a company's infancy, critical decisions are being made almost constantly.

However, it also doesn't mean that you can't maintain happy relationships with your family members, but something has got to give. Namely, personal interests must be sacrificed.

Work, family, personal. Pick Two.