Many of you have heard me speak passionately about happiness and self-actualization.  A lot of the science of happiness dwells on balance – the balance between the pursuits of various interests:  work, faith, friends, and personal passions.

Yesterday, AOL and I jointly made an announcement about my future, and about the balance of my life’s interests.  Here is the news release, my email to AOL employees, Jon Miller’s email to AOL employees, and the Washington Post’s coverage of the story.  I think that these sources pretty much say everything there is to say.

I am sincere when I state that my goal is to find that right balance between AOl, my sports teams, my film interests, my charitable  efforts, my venture capital investing, and my mentoring of young leaders.  But, do you know what is sad?  Everyone who knows me knows how important family is to me, but in today’s world of press spin, if you mention stepping back from work load to focus on family, people think you got fired from your job.  So – I stayed silent on it in our official documents to the press, but for those of you who know me, you know how important family matters are and how much I will look forward to having more quality time with the ones I truly love.

Here is the email I sent to all AOL employees

Dear AOL Family,

Tomorrow morning you will likely see some news about an important decision I’ve made regarding my future with AOL and, more importantly, the next phase of my life. And I wanted you to hear it from me first. On January 1, 2007, I will be stepping down from my active management of the AOL Audience Business, where today I am President, while retaining my role as Vice Chairman of AOL.

I’ve always loved AOL and all of you. And I still do. I’ve been here during good times and not so good times, and there has never been a day when I haven’t been happy to come to work and serve our customers.

I came to AOL hoping and dreaming that the interactive world would be a magical and special place. At that time we had fewer than 300,000 members and the entire online universe was less than 2 million connections. Today, there are almost 1 billion online connections, and we have about 20% of that market. And I am thrilled that we’ve played a big part in the realization of that dream. I also came to AOL dragging a cardboard dinosaur trying to inspire us to compete against the likes of Microsoft. We did that. I promised we would be one of the world’s leading interactive media companies. And we did that, too. And at our last all-hands meeting I asked everyone to stand up and turn, to symbolize our new direction, which you all have done. Thank you. We have reconceptualized AOL — with all green arrows and growing fast, and with a bold new mission statement — which is what I promised you four years ago when I stepped back into day-to-day management at AOL.

There are so many things I am proud of AOL for doing, but I am perhaps most proud of our recent efforts to build our new Audience Business. Just over two years ago, we talked about launching AOL.com as a portal. Just over a month ago, we announced that our advertising business is growing faster than Yahoo’s. Today, the Audience Business is AOL’s business. This company is in great hands, and it is absolutely on the right path.

I bet that I haven’t gone a week in the past four years when someone hasn’t asked me why I continue to work full-time at AOL — running meetings, drilling down on numbers, getting on product launch conference calls, making sales calls, working on technology issues, and making sure this is a company we can always believe in. My answer has always been that I love this company, and I love this business. And I love its people. And that’s still true today.

But at the same time, some other interests have been calling me, and I’d now like to balance out all of my life’s pursuits. Some of you know I’m producing a film called ‘Nanking’ that is going to be released in 2007. I have a couple of other ideas bouncing around in my head and I’m finding this creative pursuit really fulfilling. You probably know that I have a lot of other interests to pursue — from philanthropy to my sports teams — and even some new entrepreneurial efforts that have been in my head for the past year or so. This is a great moment for me to redefine my role at AOL and spend more of my energy on some of the other activities that also make me happy.

I am still going to be actively involved in the next chapters of the AOL story, just in a different way. And none of this will change until next year; I will still serve in my role as President of the AOL Audience Business through the end of this year. After that, I will continue on as Vice Chairman of AOL, offering my vision and strategic advice as we transform this great company into a leading, global Web services company. I’d also like to be something of a consumer conscience for our company and provide a voice as to what is the essential AOL-ness about our products and services and culture. I also plan to continue to mentor and encourage many of our great young leaders.

AOL is on a march to serve the world’s largest and most engaged community, and I plan to be with you — in one capacity or another — every step of the way.

You have always been there for me, and I feel responsible to AOL, to its employees, its users, and its advertisers. I promise that I will continue to work hard and stay focused, and will hand off my duties to great new leaders who will build on what we’ve created.

For now though, let’s stay the course, and get back to work!

Love,

Ted

Here is Jon Miller’s email to all AOL employees

Good evening, everyone.

If you are still up and online, you’ve just seen the e-mail from Ted announcing his plans for what he calls "the next phase of my life." I just want to say a few things about this news.

We owe Ted an enormous debt of gratitude. For his wisdom, and for his incredible strategic sense. For the way he has always understood what is special about AOL and the responsibilities we have to millions of people. For his incredible warmth. And for his having worked as hard as any of us long past a moment when he had to.

On my second day here, within hours of meeting Ted, I asked him to step into a full-time management role. He did so with gusto, working tirelessly ever since to make AOL better. We also talked over the years about a time when he would not have to carry these many responsibilities. And we talked about how even when Ted stepped back from line management, we wanted him to be available to all of us in a role that is of immense value — as strategist, visionary, and conscience of AOL. And so it now will be.

To those who work in the Audience Business, I urge you not to be concerned about what this means directly for you. Within the next several days, we will be updating you, and the whole company, on some organizational changes that have been crafted with Ted’s active participation.

We will have Ted working with us full-time between now and the end of the year. But he will continue to be here long after January 1.

For the moment though, let’s reflect on how fortunate we all are to know Ted and to work with him. It’s not often that human beings come in such a package — brilliance tempered by kindness, seriousness of purpose matched with incredible good humor, a real work ethic combined with a sense of what life is all about.

How lucky we are to have had Ted doing what he has done for us, and for what he will continue to do for us.

Warmly,

Jon