- Former President Barack Obama admits that if you want to find career success, you shouldn’t expect to always have work–life balance; it’s okay to “throw yourself into work,” as long as you make up for it later, he says. After a hard-core campaign season, he set a strict rule as president to have dinner every night with Michelle and his two daughters, Sasha and Malia.
If finding success in your career is on your bucket list, you might need to get used to working lunches and staying past 5 p.m. That’s, at least, according to former President Barack Obama, who recently revealed that achieving proper work–life balance will not always be possible.
“If you want to be excellent at anything—sports, music, business, politics—there’s going to be times of your life when you’re out of balance, where you’re just working and you’re single-minded,” he admitted on The Pivot Podcast.
It’s a lesson he—and his family learned the hard way.
The 63-year-old admitted that when he first ran for president, he was on the constant grind for over a year and a half. While he said he would take some breaks during the weekends, his wife Michelle was largely left picking up the slack at home, taking care of the kids, even while she had a full-time job of her own.
Though the time away from his family led to two terms in the White House, Obama admitted it wasn’t sustainable. As president, he set a rule where he had family dinner every night at 6:30pm—even if he had to go back to work later. And while some leaders might think it takes away valuable work time, he said the opportunity to decompress with family was actually incredibly impactful.
“They ground you and give you perspective, and over time, that makes you better,” he said.
Work–life balance will come and go
Even as a former president, Obama admitted that his political accomplishments—what kept him away from his family—won’t be what he remembers at the end of life. Instead, it’ll be the love and memories he had with his children.
“I don’t think there’s a perfect formula,” he said at an Obama Foundation event in 2019. “I think it starts with recognizing that on my deathbed, I am confident that I will not remember any bill I passed, I will not remember any speech I gave, any big crowds.”
That’s not to say career aspirations are not important, he said, it just means the level of commitment someone can give to their work all depends on what life is like at home—and vice versa.
“There will be phases in your life where you have to prioritize different things,” Obama said. “There are times where it will be okay for you to just throw yourself into work because everything’s in a pretty good place. There are going to be times where you have to maybe make some sacrifices on the work side because things aren’t all okay at home.”
For couples, the same premise applies—sometimes sacrifice will be made to aid the other to focus on their dream, but the favor has to be returned.
“In both cases, (Michelle and I) try to say, you can have it all—but you can’t have it all at once,” he told The PivotPodcast. “You have to recognize there may be times in your life that you are going to be busy, and the other person has to put up the slack, but you have to be willing to do that for the other person as well and try to create some equity inside the family.”
Fortune has reached Obama for comment.
LinkedIn’s cofounder agrees that work-life balance isn’t for winners
The debate over work-life balance isn’t just top of mind for political leaders—but business leaders, too.
LinkedIn’s cofounder, Reid Hoffman, has previously said that work–life balance is not much of an option for entrepreneurs who want to break through the competition.
“If I ever hear a founder talking about, ‘this is how I have a balanced life’—they’re not committed to winning,” Hoffman told Stanford University’s “How to Start a Startup” class in 2014. “The only really great founders are [the one’s who are] like, ‘I am going to put literally everything into doing this.’”
But like Obama, Hoffman had one exception to the grind: dinner with families.
“When we started LinkedIn, we started with people who had families. So we said, sure, go home have dinner with your family,” Hoffman said late last year on the Diary of a CEO podcast. “Then, after dinner with your family, open up your laptop and get back in the shared work experience and keep working.”
For other leaders, having structured work–life balance is non negotiable. In fact, Laxman Narasimhan, the former CEO of Starbucks, previously told Fortune that he’s “very disciplined about balance.”
“It’s got to be a pretty high bar to keep me away from the family.”
