While millennial and Gen Z workers consistently rank work-life balance as their No. 1 priority, Iñaki Ereño, the chief executive of one of the world’s largest health care companies, says if you’re obsessing over balance, your problem isn’t the hours. It’s the job.
“When the balance of your life becomes a topic, then you have a problem,” Ereño exclusively told Fortune. “You need to like your job, to not feel that your life needs to be balanced.”
Essentially, in his eyes, needing to separate work from life with a hard 5 p.m. cutoff doesn’t make sense when you genuinely love what you do. So if you’re constantly counting down the hours to the end of the day, it’s probably a sign that something fundamentally isn’t clicking.
Ereño says he loves running the £16.9-billion-a-year ($23 billion) Fortune 500 Europe company with over 100,00 employees—so much so he thinks about it even while at the gym lifting weights with his 23-year-old son. And it doesn’t stop there.
“I enjoy thinking about business things on the weekends,” the 61-year-old admitted. “I do emails, and I read my papers and all of that. Do I feel that that is a big pressure? No … I enjoy doing that. So I don’t feel I need to think about how I balance my life.”
His advice for anyone who lives for the weekend? “I think the advice here is to take some time to think about what you like doing,” he added. “Don’t do a job that you don’t like, so then you need balance.”
In other words, stop chasing work-life balance and instead start asking yourself why you’re craving it. Consider that it might be time to change not just your schedule, but your career.
The Fortune 500 Europe CEO’s strict daily routine
When Ereño is not running a multibillion-dollar health care group, he is, by his own admission, still very much in work mode. Just not in a way that feels punishing to him.
He starts most mornings around 6:30 a.m. with a black coffee and six newspapers—three in English, three in Spanish—on his iPad before jumping on the Tube (Britain’s subway) to Bupa’s London office.
By 8 a.m., the meetings begin. They are back‑to‑back until roughly 6 p.m. That’s when he takes a mental pause: “I spend some time with myself, a little bit of reflecting on the day, maybe answering a few emails.” Then he finally leaves the building—not for the sofa, but for a 50‑minute walk home that he originally introduced as a “detox” and has since turned into a nonnegotiable daily habit.
When he’s “off duty,” he hits the gym—keeping pace with his Gen Z son. “I go to the gym six times a week. I do four days of weights and two days on the treadmill,” he said, adding that he’ll often talk through work dilemmas with his son (who doubles up as his personal trainer) while working out.
And he insists that that kind of regimen is “100% totally” necessary when managing over 100,000 employees and serving the needs of over 60 million customers worldwide.
“My decisions impact many people,” Ereño added, and that “amalgamation of staying grounded, doing some exercise, and having as stable a life as possible” is the framework that keeps him sane and able to lead with clarity under pressure.
Many CEOs scoff at work-life balance
It’s a take that might ruffle feathers in a post-pandemic world that has come to treat work-life balance as a nonnegotiable. But some of the most successful people on the planet would tell you Ereño is simply stating the obvious.
Scale AI billionaire Lucy Guo, who wakes up at 5:30 a.m. and works until midnight, puts it plainly: “I would say that if you feel the need for work-life balance, maybe you’re not in the right work,” she told Fortune. The 30-year-old, who dethroned Taylor Swift as the youngest self-made woman billionaire in the world, says work simply doesn’t feel like work to her: “I love doing my job.” Sound familiar?
Likewise, Grammy-winning artist turned AI entrepreneur Will.i.am echoes that when you’re building something that’s truly yours, the grind doesn’t feel like a grind. “Work-life balance means that you’re working for somebody else’s dream,” he told Fortune, adding that he hasn’t stopped working, even to celebrate his birthday, in years.
LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman goes further, saying that workers who chase work-life balance are “not committed to winning.” When he was running the company, staff were expected to always be on—with one exception. Dinner with family. After that? “Open up your laptop and get back in the shared work experience and keep working.”
Jensen Huang’s company, Nvidia, recently became the most valuable in the world—and he says it’s thanks to his relentless, always-on approach. “I work from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep. I work seven days a week,” he has said. “When I’m not working, I’m thinking about working.” His justification? “If you want to do extraordinary things, it shouldn’t be easy.”
Despite having dinner with his family every night at the White House, former President Barack Obama noted you shouldn’t expect to have work-life balance if you want a thriving career. “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 said on The Pivot Podcast, adding that when he was running for president he went a year and a half without proper weekends.
And Palantir CEO Alex Karp, whose company has surged past a $350 billion market cap, has a blunt message for Gen Z specifically: “I’ve never met someone really successful who had a great social life at 20.”
His advice isn’t to give up everything, but like Ereño, to find work that makes the sacrifice feel worth it. “Most people have something they’re talented at and enjoy. Focus on that. Organize your whole life around that.”
