Work life balance is B.S.
The Daily Drip
This topic brought to you by @Cleverlike in our Slack community. Join the party! Suggest a topic, dive deep with the rest of us, or lurk as long as you want.
Somehow, lots of people learned that they could achieve "balance" in their lives.
Work/life balance is probably the best example.
We want to be like yin and yang, perfectly proportioned and flowing with the rhythm of life.
Guess what?
That person was a jerk and also dead wrong.
Life doesn't have a rhythm. Life is a wild roller coaster with a broken seat buckle that makes you nervous around every turn but you still have to muscle up a smile for that stupid camera that goes off right when you're the most scared.
Balance is a fallacy.
What's more pragmatic is seeking symbiosis.
Do your work and life complement each other? Does your life rejuvenate and energize your work and vice versa?
But Chris, what does that even look like?
Here are some things that energize me at work:
Coaching a team.
Bulldozing problems for colleagues.
Seeing results.
Seeing results that actually impact people.
Here are some things that energize me in my personal life:
Mentoring students.
Going on silly adventures with friends.
Running in the mountains and being a little scared of the terrain.
Excessive exercise that completely exhausts me at the end of the day.
Playing music.
Cooking delicious food.
It's not possible to have perfect symbiosis every day, but it's a way more feasible target than balance. Life just has a way of knocking things out of balance.
Paying attention to the things that energize and rejuvenate us affords us the ability to call on those things when we're feeling low energy. They won't all work in every situation--which is why I have a list.
Just like your investments, you need to diversify your sources of energy. When I'm exhausted from an "off day" at work and guitar just isn't doing it for me, I know I can try several other things to improve my energy level.
This is way more practical than trying to fit everything together "just so."
Arguably, the most important part of practicing work/life symbiosis is the acceptance that life is ups and downs.
Peak performance is only possible for a moment (at the peak). Some days you need to clear out your entire brain from everything in order to start fresh on Monday. Some days, you need to just stay at low energy for a bit.
Sundays are great for system reboots.
Happy Sunday.
