“When the balance of your life becomes a topic, then you have a problem,” Ereño exclusively told Fortune. “You need to like your job, to not feel that your life needs to be balanced.”
Essentially, in his eyes, needing to separate work from life with a hard 5 p.m. cutoff doesn’t make sense when you genuinely love what you do. So if you’re constantly counting down the hours to the end of the day, it’s probably a sign that something fundamentally isn’t clicking.
“I enjoy thinking about business things on the weekends,” the 61-year-old admitted. “I do emails, and I read my papers and all of that. Do I feel that that is a big pressure? No … I enjoy doing that. So I don’t feel I need to think about how I balance my life.”
His advice for anyone who lives for the weekend? “I think the advice here is to take some time to think about what you like doing,” he added. “Don’t do a job that you don’t like, so then you need balance.”
In other words, stop chasing work-life balance and instead start asking yourself why you’re craving it. Consider that it might be time to change not just your schedule, but your career.
When Ereño is not running a multibillion-dollar health care group, he is, by his own admission, still very much in work mode. Just not in a way that feels punishing to him.
He starts most mornings around 6:30 a.m. with a black coffee and six newspapers—three in English, three in Spanish—on his iPad before jumping on the Tube (Britain’s subway) to Bupa’s London office.
By 8 a.m., the meetings begin. They are back‑to‑back until roughly 6 p.m. That’s when he takes a mental pause: “I spend some time with myself, a little bit of reflecting on the day, maybe answering a few emails.” Then he finally leaves the building—not for the sofa, but for a 50‑minute walk home that he originally introduced as a “detox” and has since turned into a nonnegotiable daily habit.
And he insists that that kind of regimen is “100% totally” necessary when managing over 100,000 employees and serving the needs of over 60 million customers worldwide.
“My decisions impact many people,” Ereño added, and that “amalgamation of staying grounded, doing some exercise, and having as stable a life as possible” is the framework that keeps him sane and able to lead with clarity under pressure.
It’s a take that might ruffle feathers in a post-pandemic world that has come to treat work-life balance as a nonnegotiable. But some of the most successful people on the planet would tell you Ereño is simply stating the obvious.
His advice isn’t to give up everything, but like Ereño, to find work that makes the sacrifice feel worth it. “Most people have something they’re talented at and enjoy. Focus on that. Organize your whole life around that.”
