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 »

One expression that I hear frequently now that I am an entrepreneur is: Don’t take it personally.

I’ve heard this from several entrepreneurs, investors, coaches, friends, family, you name it. Usually it comes up in a conversation where I talk about a difficult issue or challenge I am facing, or something that is not going as well as I’d like.”Don’t take it personally,” they say, and I nod to move the conversation along.

But I feel like I need to go on some kind of a public record here and say that I don’t buy that argument, not for a minute. To me, business is all about being personal. It’s both the most exciting and the most excruciatingly difficult part of being an entrepreneur. When I see a member being helped by other members on the site, when I get a note from someone saying they love Work It, Mom!, when I read a great member article, note, or blog post, I feel an unbelievable kind of pride and satisfaction. When we’re not growing as quickly as I’d like, when we release a new feature or design element that’s not working well, when a competitor does something better than we do, I feel responsible, stressed, and upset. I take it personally and I could not imagine not doing that.

Frankly, I didn’t think anyone could not take their business personally, but apparently I am wrong. Read the rest of this entry »