As our business grew, I started neglecting my family and friends--and no advice seemed to help bring balance. That is, until I read this passage.

Is attaining balance really possible in an entrepreneurial environment? Over the past six years I have struggled to achieve some semblance of balance when it comes to managing both my business with my personal life. I have read several books, and sought counseling from wise sages. None have been able to provide me with a sound strategy to achieve some semblance of balance in my life.

This got me thinking, is balance in a start-up entrepreneurial environment really possible?

The reason why I bring this up is because one of my good friends from childhood has cancer. I went to see him a few months ago and he had just finished chemotherapy, and was recovering. Prior to that meeting, I hadn't seen him for about a year.

As I spoke with my friend and reflected on how short life is, I began to think about that factors that caused me to not contact him in the last year. What it came down to was myself becoming so immersed in the success of my business that I completely lost touch with him. This got me thinking: With all of the technology we have today to simplify, streamline, and generally make our lives easier, why I can’t achieve some semblance of balance in my life?

First let's consider: what precisely do I mean by balance? In my case, it's managing the growth and success of my business alongside my relationships with my wife, kids, family, and friends.

With a good deal of self-reflection I can honestly say that I am not successful in achieving balance. I always feel like I should or could be doing more with my business, my family, and my health. Is this just the plight of the entrepreneur, to constantly become so focused on something such that you lose sight and interest in all other things. This can't be it.

After researching the subject and looking at strategies ranging the gamut from dedicating specific times out the month to family, friends, and health, to performing yoga three times a week, the best advice I read came from a book of fiction, Suzanne's Diary to Nicholas, by James Patterson.

Imagine life is a game in which you are juggling five balls. The balls are called work, family, health, friends, and integrity. And you're keeping all of them in the air. But one day you finally come to understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls—family, health, friends, integrity—are made of glass. I you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered. And once you truly understand the lesson of the five balls, you will have the beginnings of balance in your life.

That's outstanding advice. Most entrepreneurs are deeply passionate about their work and vision for their companies. The reason why we work so hard is to be able to share it with our loved ones. If we do not take the time to cherish those relationships then all of this hard work will be for naught. As you focus on growing your business and the everyday challenges that come along with that goal keep in mind the phrase above.

For my foodies and wine lovers thinking about how to better balance career and personal life, try one of the most well balanced red wines I've ever had in my life, the Lions Drift Pinotage. It's clear, bright ruby red color encourages reflection while its full body and long finish, that includes hints of blueberry pie sprinkled with cinnamon, inspires enjoyment and a sense of balance.

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As part of Facebook's IPO filing, founder Mark Zuckerberg praised the concept of the "hackathon." Could something similar benefit your company, even if you're not in tech?

Welcome to 2012, a time in which hacking is praised in S-1 filings. Facebook, you may have, just maybe, heard, is going public. The IPO has set off a flurry of interest among investors and the media. Meanwhile, the company's youthful founder took the occasion to pen a letter about the fundamental mission behind his multi-billion dollar brain child. "The Hacker Way," he writes is central to how Facebook does business:

The word "hacker" has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done…. The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it—often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once.

How does Facebook put this hacker ethos into practice and instill these ideals in its employees? Hackathons, says Zuckerburg. "To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler."

A hackathon is an intriguing idea to drive talent towards risk taking, experimentation and, dare I type it, even fun. But can it work in firms that lack hackers, meaning those in older school industries that produce physical goods or analog services rather than code? Sure, says writer and entrepreneur Glen Stansberry in an American Express OPEN Forum post recently, explaining that a "hack day" might be a great idea for your business as well for several reasons:

• It's exciting and morale boosting. "The event itself was far more exciting than I thought it would be," says Stansberry of his company's hack day.
• It teaches the skill of shipping. "Shipping–as defined by Seth Godin–is defeating resistance and delivering a product, even if the product isn't perfect."
• Having a hack day project "out there" gives you something to start improving. "When our Hack Day was done, we had something that was, in all honesty, pretty terrible," Stansberry admits. "But that's not the important part. The important part was the psychological boost of knowing that it was out there, and it's driven us to improve it daily."

If you think you need to be in the tech biz to reap these same benefits, think again. Nearly all business have a problem or project that you team could tackle for a hack day, according to Stansberry:

Most likely there's a new idea, or some aspect of your business that needs some serious work. A hack day is a perfect opportunity to tackle it. The important thing is that you take a day to make a minimum viable product and release it. So the question for you is this: what can you do to improve your business in a day? What can you build or re-work in a day that will allow your team to feel the success of shipping?

Could borrowing the concept of Facebook's "hackathon" benefit your business?

In the race to get Internet TV shows and movies into the living room, Boxee co-founder Idan Cohen notices unanticipated advantages of being the (much) smaller player.

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Harvard Business School professor Robert S. Kaplan explains his questions for effective leadership, and identifying the impact you want to make.

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You launched your idea on Kickstarter... but the crowds (and their wallets) never came. Here's what you did wrong.

Raising money is time-consuming and frustrating, particularly when you're not looking for millions upon millions to scale up your operations. Bankers often aren't inclined to lend. Investors may hold out for opportunities to put more money into a company, and might want too much equity in return for what they do provide.

This is where crowdfunding has opened a new frontier for business owners. This still relatively new form of raising capital leverages dedicated social networks of entrepreneurs with companies and investors looking for opportunities. It couldn't be easier to launch a crowdfunding campaign; launching a successful one is a different story.

Here are four reasons why campaigns fail:

1. You didn't nail the presentation.

Social networks may be generally informal, but don't make the mistake of thinking that investors are ever casual. Just ask Lloyd W. Armbrust, II, CEO of Austin-based OwnLocal, which runs websites and does SEO and social media management for small companies.

"We're a Y Combinator company from 2010, so we raised our first chunk of change out of YC," says Armbrust, a veteran entrepreneur. "We had connections, we had some great investors." In 2010, OwnLocal grossed $120,000, with half going to newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations that act as sales agents in their local markets. Partway through 2011, the company was on a million dollar run rate, but needed more cash. So, starting in April, OwnLocal listed itself on an investor site called AngelList.

You can believe that Armbrust had a solid presentation online to catch that interest. "I created a cut-down succinct version of our pitch deck, about four minutes," he says. Then the company posted a video. "The next day, we had 40 meetings set," he says. Eventually he had 10 investors who collectively put in $2 million. "We were talking about a traditional series A, but decided not to because of the number and quality of people we could bring in."

2. You didn't ask for enough.

Experts typically tell entrepreneurs there will be a minimum investment size that is realistic because the amount of work to qualify a $10,000 investment or $100,000 investment is about the same. Traditional investing looks to place larger amounts of money for the sake of efficiency.

In crowdfunding, smaller can often work well, depending on the network you use. Asking for less may seem like a safe approach, particularly on sites like Kickstarter.com, where you get nothing if you don't meet your funding goal. But it can be a mistake.

Many companies that look for smaller amounts of money find that they didn't look for enough to be successful in their ventures. "From the outside, it can seem like every project on Kickstarter is a success," says Joe Demin, founder of Yellow Leaf Hammocks, which had a Kickstarter goal to raise $10,000 and pulled in $11,400. "Until you start digging, you don't realize that a lot of the projects that meet their funding goal still don't necessarily make a profit."

3. You didn't put enough work into working the crowd.

Many also assume that the crowdfunding process is relatively easy compared to traditional ways. Not at all. "There is also a huge amount of time and hustle it takes to build momentum before your campaign opens to the public," Demin says. "There is [also] a lot of vagueness surrounding Kickstarter: their guidelines, the way they select campaigns to feature, etc. It feels a little like you're pledging a secret society when you take the leap."

Dennis Caraher, together with his wife Janet Street, started a side business called Easy Keepers, which sells non-toxic bendable toys. They raised only $4,863 of a $12,000 goal on Kickstarter. "We probably should have built up our fan base before we jumped in," he says. "We thought that… and this is probably a little bit of magical thinking… the video [we produced on the product] is so good that people will be looking for it. But there are thousands and thousands of Kickstarters, so the chance of you attracting attention is pretty remote."

4. You failed to put your eggs in different baskets.

Most important is to remember that crowdfunding may not become your path to capital. "Even if you make your Kickstarter goal, it doesn't mean you're going to make it in the business," Caraher says. "You still need a solid business plan and all the things you need to start a business."

But then, there's a lot more available from crowdfunding than just money. You can build support and the beginning of a loyal customer base. That ultimately can be worth far more than short-range funding.