I've run across a couple of fascinating -- and impressively honest -- recent posts from entrepreneurs who are struggling with friction between work and life. This one and this one are highly recommended.

These posts inspired me to jot down a few of my own thoughts on this work-life stuff. I've struggled with something similar, but I have a slightly different perspective.

(Disclaimer: What follows is what works for me. There's no system here. I don't have any clue if what I've learned has relevance to anyone else.)

Here goes ...

I'm not an entrepreneur. I thought I might be for a while there. But after realizing that my timid attempts at business were defined not by passion or a deep need, but by their timidity, I did what I was always supposed to do: I acknowledged the reality.

And now I'm good with that.

See, instead of founding a business that makes ungodly sums in a buyout, the thing I want to achieve -- my reason for being -- is much harder and has a much larger reward. I'm pursuing it with the same rigor and vigor you'd see in a type-A "serial entrepreneur."

What is it?

Balance. Life-long balance.

I want to see if it's possible to find and maintain true balance throughout my existence. I don't want to sway between work and life, divvying up chunks of time between the two sides like coins on a scale. Nope. Does anyone ever pull that off?

Instead, what I want is to have a firm understanding of what's most important to me and make my decisions accordingly.

You know who does this well? Ralph Nader.

Seriously.

The Nader documentary "An Unreasonable Man" spends a little time looking at Nader's seemingly non-existent social life. And there's a line in there -- I can't remember precisely how it goes -- that summed up Nader's perspective. I think it was, "You're either hard-core or in the wife corps."

I respect that. The guy realized where his passions lie. He committed and made decisions accordingly. Granted, that's the exact opposite of where I'm coming from, but you've got to give the guy credit. (If you're interested, this Nader profile covers similar ground.)

Like anyone with a creative spark, I often mull big ideas and big projects. But I rarely commit to those things because I've already committed -- wholeheartedly -- to my family. I'm married. I chose to get married. I have kids. I chose to have kids. And when I made these choices, I knew deep down they were the right choices for me.

I used to struggle with the push-pull between family and work. "I should write a book," I'd think. "I should build that business." "I should get funding or take out a loan and pursue 'the dream'."

Nonsense. I didn't have a dream. I had a fear. I was scared I wasn't living up to my potential; that I was wasting all kinds of opportunity.

After the birth of my second kid, I was too tired and maybe too old to give a damn anymore. I finally accepted that I'm not that guy. I don't have the burning desire to build an empire. My burning desire is to build a good, loving, fulfilling, life. To be a good husband and father. That's my empire. That's what drives me.

If I do end up writing a book, it'll be because I've got the time to do so. If I start a company, I guarantee it'll be a small business. Something manageable. Those types of things will only come to pass if they get in line with my real responsibilities and goals.

It was a long time coming, but I finally accepted that my perspective -- the one I tried to drive down and ignore -- was okay. There's plenty of smart entrepreneurs building awesome businesses. The world will be just fine if I'm not leading a parade.

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Sidenote / caveat: I love my job. It's satisfying work and I'm incredibly lucky to be in the position I am. If I didn't have this gig, I'm sure my perspective would be radically different. But I've learned (finally) to appreciate the things I have -- like, right now -- and at this moment I've got a great job working for a great company. If that ever changes, I'll undoubtedly go through a period of doubt. That's how life works. But this "balance" thing is my center; it's my Weeble-Wobble core. Even when I didn't realize it was picking me up, it was.

As a kid, I used to live for new editions of Beckett Baseball Card Monthly. Apparently, I wasn't alone:

American boys growing up in the 1980s approached Beckett Baseball Card Monthly with something like religious reverence. For many of us, it was the first magazine we bought and the only one we leafed through regularly. The magazine's circulation eventually reached about 1 million, with many of those issues no doubt destined for the book bags of young boys. We walked the school hallways in the '80s with our Becketts sandwiched between our textbooks, and we followed the price fluctuations of our favorite players with slavish devotion. Beckett's valuations served as the foundation for all card trades.

And just so everyone realizes how serious/geeky I was about baseball cards: I worked at The Baseball Shop in Orleans, Ma. through most of high school. I loved this stuff.

The magazine industry might want to consult the following video the next time they're fighting for consumers' hearts and minds.

Be sure to watch the whole thing. It's not what it initially appears to be. And you might want to gird yourself for the inevitable torrent of copycats to come.

Here's an interesting piece from the New York Times that looks at Facebook Connect's growing role as a sign-on / social graph utility. Twitter and Google have similar products. Why is this important? This excerpt sums it up:

Since Facebook Connect was introduced in December 2008, more than 80,000 Web sites and services have put the log-in feature to use, said Ethan Beard, director of the Facebook developer network ... "Facebook is evolving through Facebook Connect into much more than a Web site," said Mr. Beard, who works closely with Facebook's community of third-party developers. "It's also a technology and a service to provide social plumbing and creating a social layer the whole Web can leverage." [Emphasis added.]

These sign-on services, along with other APIs, attempt to achieve lock-in through ubiquity. That's infinitely fascinating to me. Take Twitter, for example. It's become the standard for micromessaging (or microblogging or whatever you want to call it) not by forcing people into a Twitter.com silo, but by allowing the Twitter service to seep into the web's nooks and crannies. Put another way: "platform" is way more powerful than "website."

I did something amazing today.

I held out for nearly four hours before pre-ordering an iPad. Seriously. That's a huge deal for me. I mean, I own the Apple Airport Extreme, okay? I've got an Apple TV and a Mac Mini. My Apple fanboyism teeters on psychosis.

To reward me for my loyalty (and my recent herculean effort and inevitable cave-in), Apple continues to release details on the iPad that have nipped any lingering buyer's remorse in the bud. For example, there's this info delight that comes courtesy Wired's Gadget Lab:

And for EPUB titles that are not offered through the iBooks store, you can manually add them to iTunes and then sync them to the iPad ... That's good news for iPad customers, because that means bookworms won't be limited to the offerings in the iBooks store, which are based on partnerships that Apple inked with publishers.

This is a genius move on two fronts:

1. It makes the iPad semi-open. If you've already got EPUB files hanging around, you can port them to the iPad. And if you buy future EPUB-based books from smart publishers that support the format (ahem), you should be able to sync those titles with the device as well. The original iPod took off because it automatically worked with the pre-existing MP3 collections people had built up. Now, there aren't that many people out there with EPUB stockpiles. I realize that. But if you do have those files, or you want to buy material outside the iBookstore down the road, you can read all that stuff on the iPad. Well played, Apple.

2. It puts Amazon in a bind because the Kindle doesn't support EPUB by default. Now that the iPad does support the format natively, that makes the Kindle even more restrictive. Think about that. Apple -- the poster child for a totalitarian product ecosystem -- is making Amazon look like the bad guy.

I'm sure I'll have plenty more to say about the iPad in coming days. Lord knows I can't stop tweeting about it. But for now, I'll revel in the anticipated joy the weekend of April 3-4 will bring: iPad on 4/3 and Red Sox opening night on 4/4.