We work, we live: the two snuggle together tighter than the pixels you're viewing as you read this post--and that fact has opened up the Great Work/Life Balance Debate, with calls for integration [2], fit [3], and a feeling that the whole thing might be a big myth [4].

Over at HBR, personality profiling expert Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic has another take [5]: that we should have work-life "fusion," allowing for the workaholic hours he says bring success--with an argument that turns on one key claim: you need to have a career, not just a job.

Finding the right match

"Work is just like a relationship," Chamorro-Premuzic writes. "Spending one week on a job you hate is as dreadful as spending a week with a person you don't like." While it seems a touch unnecessary that work is like a relationship, as we most certainly do have a relationship with the work we do, his point (mostly) sticks: "When you find the right job, or the right person, no amount of time is enough."

But the relationship comparison is a little, well, romantic: Just as you'll grow fatigued if you spend enough time with anyone, humans only have so much energy to invest in a given day [6], meaning that no matter how "in love" you are with a job, you will reach a point where you've had enough. And while Chamorro-Premuzic exhorts us to (again) find our passion, you could argue that iconic people--like Steve Jobs, to name just one--did otherwise [7].

Knowing the (psychological) difference

"If you are always counting the number of hours you work ... you probably have a job rather than a career," Chamorro-Premuzic observes. "Conversely, the more elusive the boundaries between your work and life, the more successful you probably are in both."

His claim--which feels intuitive--here that if you're looking at your watch throughout your workday, you're in the wrong racket, aligns with research in positive psychology about a state called flow [8]. Championed by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, who literally wrote the book on it [9], flow is the state where who you are and what you're doing feel like they're blending together--the feeling of total focus you get when attempting a skillset-expanding task, be it a fierce game of tennis for the racketeer or a complex problem for the mathametician.

It follows, then, that a workday loaded with flowful experiences will steer you to success, a point which, it seems, Chamorro-Premuzic's strongly titled article is subtly making.

HBR: Embrace Work-Life Imbalance
[5]
Drake Baer writes about leadership for Fast Company. You can follow him on Twitter. [10]

[Image: Flickr user Klaus [11]]