While millennial and Gen Z workers consistently place work-life balance as their No. 1 priority, Iñaki Ereño, CEO of Bupa, one of the world’s largest healthcare companies, says that if you’re obsessed with balance, the problem isn’t the hours — it’s the work.
“When your life balance becomes an issue, then you have a problem,” Ereño told Fortune exclusively. “You need to enjoy your work, to the point where you don’t feel like your life needs to be balanced.”
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In practice, for him, the need to rigidly separate work and personal life, with a dry cut at 5 pm, doesn’t make sense when you really love what you do. So, if you keep counting down the hours until the end of the day, it’s probably a sign that something fundamental isn’t working.
Ereño says he loves running the Fortune 500 Europe company, which turns over £16.9 billion a year (R$114 billion) and has more than 100,000 employees — to the point that he even thinks about work when he’s at the gym lifting weights with his 23-year-old son. And it doesn’t stop there.
“I like to think about work matters on the weekends,” admitted the 61-year-old executive. “I answer emails, read newspapers and everything. Do I feel like that’s a lot of pressure? No… I like doing that. So I don’t feel like I need to think about how to balance my life.”
Your advice for those who live waiting for the weekend? “I think the advice here is to take time to think about what you enjoy doing,” he added. “Don’t do a job you don’t like, only to find balance later.”
In other words, stop chasing work-life balance and start asking yourself why you feel the need. Consider that maybe it’s time to change not just your routine, but your career.
The CEO’s strict daily routine
When he’s not running a multibillion-dollar healthcare group, Ereño, by his own admission, is still very much in work mode — just in a way that doesn’t feel draining.
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He starts most mornings around 6:30am with a black coffee and six newspapers — three in English and three in Spanish — on his iPad, before catching the London Underground to the Bupa office.
At 8am, the meetings begin. They follow one after the other until around 6pm. That’s when he takes a mental break: “I spend time with myself, reflecting a little on the day, maybe answering some emails.”
Only then does he leave the building — not for the couch, but for a 50-minute walk home, which started as a “detox” and became a non-negotiable daily habit.
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When he’s “off the clock,” he goes to the gym — keeping pace with his Gen Z son. “I go to the gym six times a week. I do four days of weight training and two days on the treadmill,” he said, adding that he often discusses work dilemmas with his son (who also acts as his personal trainer) during workouts.
And he insists that this kind of routine is “100% completely” necessary when managing more than 100,000 employees and serving more than 60 million customers worldwide.
“My decisions impact a lot of people,” Ereño added, and this “combination of keeping your feet on the ground, exercising, and having as stable a life as possible” is what keeps you balanced and able to lead with clarity under pressure.
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Many CEOs Disdain Work-Life Balance
It’s a view that can cause discomfort in a post-pandemic world that has come to treat work-life balance as non-negotiable. But some of the most successful people on the planet would say that Ereño is just stating the obvious.
Billionaire Lucy Guo of Scale AI, who wakes up at 5:30 a.m. and works until midnight, sums it up like this: “I would say if you feel the need for work-life balance, you might not be in the right job,” she told Fortune.
The 30-year-old executive, who surpassed Taylor Swift as the youngest woman to become a self-made billionaire in the world, says that work just doesn’t feel like work to her: “I love what I do.” Sound familiar?
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Similarly, Grammy-winning artist turned AI entrepreneur Will.i.am reinforces that when you’re building something truly yours, the effort doesn’t feel like a burden.
“Work-life balance means you’re working towards someone else’s dream,” he told Fortune, adding that he hasn’t stopped working even to celebrate his own birthday in years.
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman goes further and states that professionals who seek work-life balance “are not committed to winning”. When I led the company, employees were expected to always be available — with one exception: dinner with the family. After that? “Open the laptop and go back to the shared work experience and keep working.”
Jensen Huang’s company, Nvidia, recently became the most valuable in the world — and he says that’s because of his tireless, always-on approach. “I work from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to sleep. I work seven days a week,” he said. “When I’m not working, I’m thinking about working.” The justification? “If you want to do extraordinary things, it shouldn’t be easy.”
Despite having dinner with his family every night at the White House, former President Barack Obama highlighted that you shouldn’t expect to have a work-life balance if you want a prominent career.
“If you want to be great at anything — sports, music, business, politics — there will be times in your life when you are off balance, just focused on working,” he said on The Pivot podcast, adding that when he was campaigning for president, he went a year and a half without real weekends.
And Palantir CEO Alex Karp, whose company has surpassed a market value of $350 billion, has a blunt message especially for Gen Z: “I’ve never met anyone really successful who had an amazing social life in their 20s.”
His advice is not to give up everything, but, like Ereño, find a job that makes the sacrifice worth it. “Most people have something they’re talented at and enjoy doing. Focus on that. Organize your whole life around it.”
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