It may not look like I’m blogging, but that’s just because it’s happening in so many other places! (Note to self: write a WorkLoveLife post about the trials & tribulations of having 3 blogs…)

HollyHoffman.com: 3 Social Media Offenders Creep Into Late Adopter Markets

NeoviaSolutions.com: Avoiding Social Media Less of an Option for Businesses

Check out my social media thoughts here. And check out my brand-spanking new company, Neovia Solutions. You’ll see lots of great stuff there for businesses and organizations trying to “get” social media.

When I started WorkLoveLife in February 2008, I knew nothing about social media, blogs, or platforms. I wasn’t on Facebook or Twitter, and I was still using a Hotmail account (oh, the naivete!). I was blogging on MySpace when I decided to start a “real” blog. I didn’t do any research when choosing a platform… I don’t know what lead me to Blogger, but that’s what I went with.

Over the past year-and-a-half, a lot has changed. I’ve changed, and my knowledge about social media has certainly grown. And I have to admit that I’ve felt even a little embarrassed about my once-adequate blog, especially when I built a new blog site on WordPress, which looked so clean and was so user-friendly.

And so, I finally grabbed Andrew Norcross and set out to redesign this blog. It’s given so much to me since I started it, it seems only fair to give it the platform and style it deserves, a style that reflects what it is I do on this blog.

I hope you enjoy the new WorkLoveLife as much as I do.

I’m getting a little tired of Gen Y bloggers proudly flouting their “workaholism” in post after post of how they love their jobs, don’t see a need for work/life balance anymore and question whether or not their relationships are holding them back.

Of course, I’m guilty of several of these posts myself.

I remember Ryan Paugh from BrazenCareerist once wondering in a post if he was going to feel embarrassed by something he wrote 10 years later (I couldn’t find the link). His conclusion was that he probably would, and I concur. Even just a year later, I look back at some of my own posts and shake my head. I’ve changed my mind about some of those sanctimonious posts I wrote. (Maybe I’ll change my mind about this sanctimonious post, too at some point.)

There’s nothing like a good round of cancer scares to put things in perspective. As I’ve been forced to relax and let my “workaholism” tendencies fade into the background, I’ve figured out a few things. One is that the stress in my life came from the label I gave myself as a “workaholic.” I have found that I’m not actually working on less projects now, but that my mind has released the “have-to, have-to, have-to” thoughts that kept my mind racing even when I wasn’t working on something.

I’ve also watched my boyfriend run his distribution business over the past few months. He travels 3 hours away to tend his business weekly, aside from his local branch. He has a business in the sense that he’s not freelancing or consulting or designing websites – he has an office manager, employees with health insurance, customers who demand his time, and expenses that would make me cringe. He experiences a kind of daily stress and time demands that we Gen Y I-run-my-personal-brand types can’t imagine. I don’t care how many nights you slept in your office waiting for your start-up site to go live.

So here’s the deal. You’re not a workaholic. And you’re no different from the young-go-getters of the 1980s. (Please watch “Working Girl.” I mean, those people were always on and always “working.” We’re not the first people to discover taking our jobs seriously.)

We’re simply at the work-hard-to-get-ahead life stage. Like I said, we’re not the first. We’re supposed to be working hard right now because later, we’re going to want to take a break. I know, I know. You luuuuuuhhv your job. Great. For now. Later you will find that you luuuuuuuhhv being home to cook dinner for your kids. The other thing is that “getting ahead” looks different today than it did 20 years ago. Our parents worked late hours, took extra projects on, and went to night school to get higher degrees and certifications. We still do all that stuff, just now we’re also tending to our blogs, websites, overall web presence, personal brands, etc.

We don’t have a “life” to balance yet.
We’re in our twenties. We don’t have kids yet (for the most part), and we might have girlfriends or boyfriends, but not the kind of relationships that require time, energy and work to maintain because they simply haven’t become that important or demanding yet. We’re not trying to figure out how to make our 10-year-old marriage last because we see the love of earlier years fading. We don’t have children pulling us away from our “me” time. Jesus, you’ve still got time for the gym. Ask a working mom if she’s got time for that… if she does it’s at 5 a.m. while everyone else is still sleeping. That is what work/life balance is – not trying to schedule time in for a trip to the bar with friends.

We regard our life activities like they are work.
We blog because we love it, and yes, it gets us ahead in our careers, but that’s not why we keep at it. Blogging, networking, going to social media conferences and volunteering for organizations isn’t your job. We do it because in our day and age it is the new softball team. I spoke on a panel at an economic summit this week and I tried to stretch my mind to figure out how this will advance my career. My boyfriend pointed out that I did it because I think its fun. Oh yeah. That’s my LIFE, not my WORK.

We haven’t suffered the consequences of workaholism yet.
You probably haven’t even been burnt out yet, let alone laid off from your first job at a start-up, driven to real addiction, been divorced or suffered stress-related health problems. When you get there, remind me again of how much you OMG luv luv luv your job. Because I want to know if it was worth it. (The only one I haven’t done is divorce. And no, the 80-hour work weeks from the start-up that went under were not worth it. I’d happily give back the crow’s feet those earned me.)

We’re still seeking definition and identity with labels.
I wrote two weeks ago about my struggle to let go of my self-image as a go-getter, a woman on the make, etc. Elysa Rice seconded my “who am I if not a…” idea. We’ve been students forever, and now we’re joining the workforce and struggling with this notion that we need a label. We don’t. It’s a personal revolution in thought that occurs when you realize that you just are and that being a “workaholic” or a rising star or a go-getter is just a label that you try to live up to.

We like to inflate our own self-importance.
I’m really talking to myself as much to anyone else here. I think we inherently have some kind of egoistic tick that makes us trump up our own value. Gen Y doesn’t do this anymore than any other generation… we just have a syndicated platform by which to do it, in my opinion. When I declared myself a workaholic with no respect for this work/life balance nonsense, I was always rushing around in a state of self-importance trying to do everything I “needed” to do. My reality was that when I backed off, nobody suffered as a result of my loss in super-productivity, in fact no one really noticed.

I’m definitely not the oldest of my blogging compadres, but sometimes I feel like my life experiences have aged me a little. I guess there’s a part of me that wants to save my fellow twenty-somethings some of the pain I went through learning things the hard way. But then again, I didn’t listen to the people who tried to warn me. I figured I was different. I was unique. I wasn’t.

But hey, maybe I’m wrong. What do you think – are we really workaholics?

My life has been an interesting series of transitions, always changing and moving in new directions. Social media seems to mimic our lives, and my life in the virtual world has transformed right alongside my not-so-virtual life (the two are increasingly interwoven… I’m not sure I could separate one from the other anymore).

When I started WorkLoveLife in February 2008, I had no idea it would take me where I am today. What nobody tells you when you start a blog is that you will become a junkie. First, you’ll start devouring other people’s blogs in your genre. Then you start commenting on their blogs, and then you figure out that when you do that you get more readers. Oh that’s neat, you think. I wonder what else I can do to get more readers…

It spiraled out from there. As I grew WorkLoveLife, I began to run across concepts that I was already working with in my day job in marketing. And I was intrigued. Here I had been MySpacing, Facebooking (um, anyone else remember being on Friendster? I was there), Flickring, tagging and tweeting, and mixed up in all this craziness was marketing.

I wrote a few posts that really had nothing to do with Work, Love or Life, but had everything to do brand image, marketing, and social media tools. And they were some of my favorite posts to write. And scrolling through my feeds every day, I would star dozens of articles daily that I wanted to blog about… but they just didn’t seem to fit what I was doing with WorkLoveLife.

One night, not long after my day job had a serious sputter, I sat on the phone with Penelope Trunk, trying to figure out my next move when she spits out the most preposterous idea. “You should be doing social media, Holly,” she says matter-of-factly, as if she’s been reading my tea leaves. “You do it all already. Just start a blog and round out your resume with some bullets by offering to do some social media campaigns for local businesses and friends.”

I considered this and found it hard to swallow that I could offer my thoughts to others on this subject. Then I started looking around my community and saw a major hole. Nobody, and I mean nobody, had any clue when it came to social media. I met with the community in San Antonio, and god love ‘em, they encouraged me. “Holly is social media in Corpus Christi,” Luis Sandoval told someone as he introduced me. And the truth of it hit me. If nobody filled the hole, the snake oil salesmen would show up soon, and I couldn’t have that happen – not to my community, not to social media.

That was about a month ago. Voila, blog. Hello, social media marketing portfolio. And you know, I even ended up falling for the guy who was running the political action group I offered to do a Facebook promotion for.

I love social media.

My new blog is HollyHoffman.com. It’s in it’s infancy, so keep checking back for updates – first up, RSS so you don’t need to keep checking up. And WorkLoveLife isn’t going anywhere. Just doubling up the blogging efforts!

It was January 2008. My head was full of “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,” Robert Kiyosaki and that mother of all Gen Y goals – passive income. I was gonna start a blog.

After all, the people who were writing Employee Evolution, Modite and TwentySet were freaking kids compared to me. Why couldn’t I do it? Didn’t I have something to say?

So, February 2, 2008 I pushed the button. That big old publish button. And…

Nothing happened.

Well, not nothing. My family read it, old coworkers, friends, a guy I was dating. But that was about it. My first few posts bounced around.

I’m not sure when it first happened, but it came. A message from someone who said I had helped. Then another. And after a while, another. When I decided to be open about my sobriety in a very public fashion, my inbox was flooded. The comments section burst not just with congratulations, but with thank yous. Privately, I replied to emails from people who wondered if they had a problem, where they might find some help, for a variety of addictions and problems, not just alcoholism.

It’s not easy to put yourself out there; it’s not easy for me to put myself out there. While I’ve received a lot of support and praise for my candor and honesty, I’ve also been attacked at my most vulnerable point. And to be honest, there are times when it makes me not want to blog anymore. It hurts, and I’ve watched my fellow bloggers go through it, too, in the comments sections of posts they were probably already nervous to publish.

Because each time we publish, we offer a piece of ourselves to the community. Sometimes the community accepts it, maybe they even love it, but sometimes it loves to hate us. Maybe the comments affect us so much because we know the power of words. Every time we post a new entry, we’re calling on the power of those words to do something, whether it’s to address a growing problem, sway people to our political beliefs, or to simply get something off our chest.

For me, the power of my words is used to share what little I’ve learned, and more often than not, to show what I haven’t. That’s the amazing thing about blogging, this global broadcast of words – it reminds me each and every day that I’m not alone, that my situation isn’t unique. And as long as my readers keep telling me that my honesty about where I am in my life helps them, just to know that someone else is going through it too, then I’m going to keep blogging.  

Oh, and passive income? Yeah, right. To both income and passive. Blogging hasn’t earned me any money, it hasn’t gotten me a job, and it definitely hasn’t landed me a relationship, and there are days where I feel a little beaten down. But I love it. And some days, it loves me back. And that was unexpected.

Photo credit: Ashe-Villain via Flickr.