A "Balanced" Life is Boring
Driven people should treat life in seasons instead
One of the biggest lies of modern life is that in order to be happy you need to be “balanced.” It’s sold to us by the self-help industrial complex—whose purveyors, it’s worth noting, are never remotely balanced themselves.
Driven people should treat life in seasons instead of trying to balance everything every single day.
Living in seasons means a few years where you focus substantially on your craft. A few years where you commit to a physical challenge. A window when family takes priority by a mile. Then maybe another window where you go all-in on work again. A year or two for a big creative project. And so on.
Great outcomes in any area of life require making tradeoffs. It’s okay to deprioritize travel because of work. It’s okay to work less because of family. It’s okay not to be everything always.
Living in seasons makes life richer and more exhilarating. You get to experiment and learn and grow and know different parts of yourself.
The times in my own life during which I’ve felt happiest and most alive are also the times that I’ve been the least balanced. Falling in love. Writing a book. Trekking in the Himalayas. Training to set a personal record in the deadlift. Caring for an infant.
During these bouts of full-on living I was completely consumed by what I was doing. Trying to be balanced—devoting equal proportions of time and energy to other areas of my life—would have diluted the formative experiences. It would have made my life less complete.
Have you ever met someone who is super interesting and also perfectly balanced?
(I didn’t think so.)
This isn’t permission to completely neglect important parts of your life. But it is permission to drop the weight of balance, to let yourself go all in on the things that matter to you in different seasons of your life.
How do you go all in without blowing up your entire life?
I like to think about having minimum effective doses for each of the important parts of my identity: family, craft, fitness, and friends. This means when I’m focused predominantly on one of those things, I still make sure to spend enough time and energy on the others so as not to leave them completely behind.
Family time goes down during a book launch, but it never goes to zero. Work suffered massively when my kids were infants, but I did enough to stay sharp. When I’m going after a fitness goal and training hard, I don’t have as much energy for anything else. This is just how it goes, and I’m okay with it. If I tried to be great at everything always, I’d be leaving so much on the table and fighting against my own nature.
In all my years researching and writing on excellence, craft, and performance, I’ve noticed an interesting pattern: When you look at the highest performing and most satisfied people and zoom in on any one moment of their life, they don’t look very balanced. They are almost always going full steam on one, or maybe two, things. But when you zoom out and look across their entire life, they actually start to appear quite balanced. Their balance is sequential, not simultaneous.
The big shift is acknowledging that, actually, you can’t have it all. Part of being a mature adult is making tradeoffs.
Stop thinking about balance as optimizing sleep, family, work, fitness, friends, creativity, and so on every single day. Start thinking about balance in terms of years, or even decades. Think about having different seasons of life for giving your all to different things.
This post was excerpted from my latest book, The Way of Excellence. If you found it valuable, you’ll love the book.
Could a “good” dose suffice here? When I hear “minimum effective,” I think about conservation of resources to nourish the higher priorities. Good allows you to nourish those core identities (husband, father, etc), while focusing (Maximum Effective Dose) on priorities during each season. I’m sure reading the book will give me the additional context needed.
Minimum effective dose is not a metaphor in my work, it is the entire technique. Anesthesia is not a fixed amount handed to a person; it is a continuous negotiation in which I give the least that will do the job, watch what that particular body does with it, and adjust. Too much and the recovery is longer and rougher. Too little and the patient moves. What makes the phrase good life advice is the same thing that makes it good clinically - the dose is not the point, the response is, and you cannot know the response in advance from the book. The textbook is written for a population. You are treating one body. Your seasons argument is the same correction applied to a life.