Thanks to Marci Alboher, the author of the Shifting Careers blog, for linking to a series of posts about career success written by Marc Andreessen.

Marc Andreessen knows something about career success — he was the founder of Netscape and several other extremely successful companies. Before I even finished reading Marcy’s post, I clicked over to see what Marc had to say about career success (I happen to be a fan of his blog and writing.) Not far into his first post in the series is this paragraph:

These posts are aimed at high-potential people who want to excel throughout their careers and make a significant impact on their fields and the world. These posts are not appropriate for people for whom work/life balance is a high priority or for whom lifestyle is particularly important — if that’s you, there are plenty of existing career planning resources for you already!

Now, let me say first that Marc has some good career advice to offer and I agreed with a lot of it. But I couldn’t shake the assumption in his introduction that in your career and making an impact on your field isn’t something you can do if you care about having some work/life balance.

In fact, I took what he wrote very personally. Read the rest of this entry »