Would you rather be extremely successful professionally and have a tolerable yet yet unexciting private life, or have an extremely happy private life and only a tolerable and uninspiring professional life?
This is a hard question to answer. I wouldn’t say that I lead a successful professional life, so that is extremely tempting to have a successful career where I’m making lots of money. I have a happy private life now, though I wouldn’t consider it exciting in any way. I’m sure it’s exciting sometimes, but not like some people do. If I wanted to have a more exciting private life, I’d need to be more successful at my job. But you don’t necessarily need a successful job to be happy and a lot of people are successful at their jobs but not really happy privately.
So in the end, I think if it was a choice between the two extremes, I’d take the happy private life as long as my job paid me comfortably.
*The question of the week can be found in the Book of Questions by Gregory Stock, Ph.D.
Ashley French 