Key Takeaways Harley Finkelstein is the president of Shopify, an ecommerce platform valued at over $210 billion.
In a new interview, Finkelstein said that workers should aspire to work-life “harmony,” not work-life balance.
Finkelstein’s word choice echoes the viewpoint of other leaders, like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Work-life balance may be unrealistic, but employees can aspire to work-life “harmony” instead, says Shopify president Harley Finkelstein.
On a recent episode of the Aspire podcast, which aired last week, Finkelstein, who leads the ecommerce platform valued at over $210 billion, called work-life balance a “misnomer.”
“I think actually what we’re all searching for is some sort of harmony,” he said. “There are some Saturdays where I have to work, and there are some Thursday afternoons that I go for a walk with my wife. That’s my version of harmony.”
Work-life balance implies a fixed, even split between work and personal life, which rarely matches how jobs actually work. In Finkelstein’s view, harmony means accepting that some periods lean heavily toward work and others toward life, as long as the overall rhythm feels sustainable.
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Finkelstein said that work-life harmony can look different depending on the stage of life. For example, before marriage and kids, he noted that he could work 80-hour weeks. That kind of schedule became impossible when he had children.
“When I had newborns, I wasn’t able to work 80 hours,” he said. “I think everyone needs to find their own version of it.”
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