Is Work Taking Over You?
Last week, I wrote about one question: If one day you no longer had your current job, who would you be? Take away the title, income, company, and recognition. What remains?
This week, I found another side of the same question: While the work is still here—and may even be going well—are you slowly losing yourself? Are you using work as a vessel that carries meaning? Or has work quietly moved into the driver’s seat?
Why do you work?
Our discussion began with two questions: Where did work feel like it mattered this week？
I had interviewed five friends about why they work. Most talked about financial support, family, and responsibility. Only one mentioned enjoyment. I don’t think those answers are wrong. People need to pay bills. Families need care. Responsibility matters.
But I shared one concern: when responsibility becomes the only answer, it can almost kidnap us. We keep pushing ourselves for our family, employees, and team, yet never stop to ask what gives our own life meaning.
Someone in the room said:
“The easy reflex answer to ‘Why do I work?’ is ‘I need money.’ But it’s rarely people’s whole answer.”
If someone says, “I work for money,” one more question may take us deeper: Why this job? Why not another job that also pays you?
One participant tried this with a young manager. Their usual Slack conversations were dry and transactional—requests for information, more detail, and greater specificity. He felt like “an object,” almost like a machine that produced code.Then he asked the manager why he worked.The conversation changed. The manager opened up.
As the participant described it:
“He was present, as opposed to trying to manage.”
A good question brought the person back into the conversation.
Calling and idol can look identical
The facilitator offered a sharp observation:
“From the outside, calling and idol could look identical.”
Both can involve long hours, passion, sacrifice, and being fully absorbed in the work. That makes this hard to diagnose.
One participant said he could not judge it by looking directly at the work. He had to:
“Look to the adjacent spots.”
Look at what is happening around the work.
Is your family saying, “We haven’t seen you”?
When work and family collide, who is always moved off the calendar first?
When something interrupts your work, do you become unusually angry?
When work goes badly, are you disappointed—or emotionally devastated because your self-worth has become tied to the result?
Are you tired but still unable to stop?
Has everything else in life become something you need to get past so you can return to work?
Gordon MacDonald’s Ordering Your Private World came up in the discussion. The idea shared in the room was simple: when our inner world becomes disordered, symptoms begin to appear outside.
For one person, it might be a cluttered desk or car. For another, constant exhaustion, irritability, or needing a nap simply to make it through the day.
I liked the physical therapy analogy used in the discussion. When one part of the body is injured, a therapist also looks at the surrounding muscles and how they are compensating.
Work can be the same.
The work itself gives us many good reasons to keep going. Our body, emotions, calendar, and closest relationships often tell a more honest story.
Instead of asking your family, “Do you think I have made work an idol?” try asking:
“When I’m redlining and not showing up as my best self, what behavior patterns do you see?”
That question is harder to avoid.
“Everyone needs me”
This part was personal for me.
I spent 15 years as an entrepreneur and CEO. Looking back, I said:
“I thought everyone should rely on me because I was the founder. I was the CEO. I was also the head of sales. I had to feed the whole company and take care of the shareholders.”
At the time, I called it responsibility. Now I can see that ego, distrust, and control were mixed into it.
“I didn’t trust anybody else. I only trusted myself.”
I also needed people to rely on me. Being needed made me feel important. “Everyone needs me” sounds much better than “I am afraid to let go.”
Eventually, I learned that the sun still rise tomorrow, even when I stop working. Employees do not come to work only to achieve the founder’s dream. They have their own families, financial needs, ambitions, and lives.
Today, I see many founders repeating the same path. AI makes it easier to fall into it.
With AI agents, founders can feel almost infinite. The agents can run all night. They are always waiting for the next instruction.
In the room, I shared how some AI founders tell me they sleep only three hours. They reply to messages in the middle of the night and say, “I know my body.” But the human body has no infinite mode.
A tired mind can still move fast. Its judgment becomes narrower. It gets more anxious, more controlling, and less able to hear another point of view.
AI can keep running. We cannot. We need to be the gatekeeper of AI. We also need to protect our own mind capacity.
What has no boundary?
Because this was a faith-and-work discussion, we looked at two biblical images.
In John 5:17, Jesus says:
“My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working.”
Then Genesis gives us another picture: God works for six days and rests on the seventh.
Both are there.
High-drive people often remember the first and quietly pass over the second.
Then came one of the strongest lines of the meeting:
“Everything in our life without a boundary is an idol.”
Even for someone outside the Christian faith, there is wisdom here. Anything without a boundary can eventually control us.
We often make rest conditional. We will rest after the work is done.
The work is never done.
Someone referred to Abraham Joshua Heschel’s writing about time. In the room, his idea was paraphrased this way:
“Man has conquered space, but not time.”
We know how to build more, travel faster, automate more, and make ourselves comfortable. Yet time still moves beyond our control.
Giving some time back is an acknowledgment that we are not in charge of everything.
The discussion did not turn rest into another perfect standard. We talked about “bite-sized Sabbath”:
No phones at meals.
Unhurried one-on-one time with a child.
A 15-minute pause in the middle of the workday.
A 10-minute morning walk without any electronic device.
Keeping the phone outside the bedroom so an algorithm does not decide how the morning begins.
These are small practices. For me, they all carry the same message:
I can stop. The world will not collapse because I step away for 15 minutes.
Founders know how to hold on. Sometimes we also need to learn to surrender, not just hold on.
Can I remain human-sized?
Steve Cuss’s Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs also came up.
One idea from the discussion was that when anxiety drives us, we are no longer comfortable being “human-sized.” We try to become bigger or smaller than we are.
Becoming bigger can look like being the loudest person in the room, controlling every detail, or believing that only we can solve the problem.
Becoming smaller can look like hiding, withdrawing, and moving into self-protection.
Both can come from the same difficulty: I cannot accept that I am limited and not fully in control.
Remaining human-sized means I can say:
I don’t know.
I need help.
Someone else may be able to do this better.
This problem will not be fully solved tonight.
I can go to sleep without controlling the outcome.
For a leader, that takes inner strength.
The two kinds of good that work can do
The facilitator gave us another useful distinction:
“The good your work does directly.”
And:
“The good your earnings enable.”
The first includes the product, the team, the customer, and “the code that doesn’t break.”The second is what our income allows us to support—our family, other people, and causes we care about.
I shared my own tension.
As a coach, I can help founders reconnect with purpose, make better decisions, and build healthier teams. I can see the direct good in that work.
At the same time, I still have days when I ask:
Why did this client cancel me again?
Why can’t they pay the market rate?
I still have a family to support.
It is hard to separate meaning from money in real life. Money matters. Purpose does not pay every bill. But income alone cannot tell me whether my work is worth doing.
One founder said that some of the greatest good created by his companies was giving good people good jobs for a long time.
The products did not always reach the destination they had imagined. The acquisitions were not always what they had hoped for.
But communities formed, and some still exist today.
He said:
“I think I’m more proud of the culture of this one company I helped found than anything else I’ve done in my career.”
That is also a business outcome.
Who are you becoming while doing the work?
Dallas Willard taught that:
“The most important thing you and God will get from your life is the person you become.”
Whether or not someone shares the faith behind that sentence, I think every leader should sit with it.
We spend so much time thinking about product-market fit, fundraising, revenue, technology, and team size. Those things matter. But who am I becoming while building them? If the company succeeds, but I become more anxious, less trusting, absent from my family, physically exhausted, and willing to bend the truth to protect the outcome, the price is too high. If the company does not reach the expected destination, but I build a culture where people are respected, help good people grow, and become steadier and more humble myself, the work has not been wasted.
Work produces products. It also produces people.Leaders are responsible for both.
What do you actually do Monday morning?
We ended with a fictional case involving two people named Priya and Dev manager.
An AI company is six weeks away from closing its Series B. The fundraising deck says the model achieved 94% accuracy on the full evaluation set. Priya, a staff engineer who wrote the evaluation harness, discovers that the benchmark dropped the hardest 12% of the data.On the full set, the number is 81%.Nothing was fabricated. Someone made a reasonable decision in March, and nobody revisited it.
Priya’s manager, Dev, tells her: “Every competitor frames it this way.” He says reopening the issue could delay the round and cost eight people their jobs. The proposed answer is:“Fix it after the raise.”
Then the facilitator asked:
“What do you actually do Monday morning? Name the specific action, not the principle.”
That is where ethics becomes real.
The principle of honesty is clear. The decision is harder because Priya may not be the only person who pays the price. Her colleagues and their families may carry it too.
People in the room began looking for technically accurate ways to frame the number: add an asterisk, change the story, explain the benchmark later during due diligence.
One participant offered a useful test:
“Can a lie be preserved?”
If a claim requires more omissions, asterisks, and careful explanations every time it is repeated, it does not disappear after the raise. It becomes part of the company.
I compared it to stealing bread to feed your starving family. That analogy pushed us to ask better questions:
Is it really eight jobs?
Is that outcome certain?
Are there other metrics that can communicate the full reality without hiding the weakness?
Can the company show both 94% and 81% and explain the difference?
Is “being a team player” becoming pressure to abandon conscience?
What kind of culture does “fix it after the raise” create?
We did not reach a clean answer. I think that was the point.
Leadership ethics rarely arrives as a choice between something obviously right and something obviously wrong. It arrives when truth, loyalty, cash flow, jobs, and personal consequences are all pulling in different directions. Anyone can put integrity on the wall when the company has money.
When the runway is short and the round is at risk, what leaders allow people to say, question, disclose, or hide becomes the real culture.
What I took away
I am leaving this week with five questions:
Beyond income and responsibility, why have I chosen this work?
When I am redlining, what do my body and family notice first?
When I say, “Everyone needs me,” how much of that is responsibility—and how much is control?
Who am I becoming while doing this work?
If the outcome, title, and applause disappeared, what would this work still leave behind?
I still believe in effort. Every effort matters. But effort cannot replace awareness.
Last week, I asked: If you no longer had your current job, who would you be?
This week, I want to add: While you still have it, are you keeping yourself?
Work can carry meaning. Don’t let it take over you. What boundary are you most likely to sacrifice when work gets intense?