The ridiculous misconception that most people accept as perfectly reasonable is the idea of a kind of work-life balance. How can we talk about some “balance” when you spend more than a third of the years you have been given – someone takes half a century to do so – working and putting aside happiness and freedom for the very end of your life, which you may not have and which certainly will not be as long as your working years?
It turns out that you work more than you sleep! It turns out that you work more than you have fun, explore new things, create, communicate, learn and love, even if you put it all together. Where’s the balance?
Society imposes on you such a schedule: to work – on weekdays, to rest – on weekends. The Corporation imposes your working day from 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. Capitalism imposes on you the need to work to earn. The state imposes labor on you now and for the whole month for the salary you will receive at the end of the month minus all taxes and insurance. But should you actually live by the rules imposed on you by other people or systems?
The pendulum moves from one extreme point through the center to another extreme point. In the center it is very short. Most of the time it races from one extreme to another and very quickly flies the middle point. So does the “balance” between work and personal life. In the part where the attention is directed, there are results, but at this time you turn away from the other part, and there everything falls into disrepair. It is foolish to think that the pendulum will one day stop in an equilibrium position. He will swing all the time, sometimes finding himself on the side of work – and then you will start to have money, will start to advance career, but at home about you will be forgotten – sometimes moving to the side where you are all well with family and personal freedom, but bad with work and financial prospects. This is how time works, so life and attention are arranged: balance is impossible to achieve, you always have to choose from two extremes, such as “focus on something – or forget about it,” “develop – or throw,” “take over – or become a victim.”
People who control their time and control their lives, break these rules and create their own. They know another, better way to act. Have you ever heard a successful person talk about work-life balance? No? Such people never complain about the need to work, because they either love their work or do not like, but see the prospects and therefore easily overcome the immediate inconvenience. They know how to follow the movement of the pendulum.
Here are some ways to get rid of the constant feeling that you lack the “balance” between work and personal life.
Don’t share work and privacy. Work is also a life, and life is also a job, all one. Sometimes when you do even the most beloved things, you have to do something not very pleasant, something painful and humiliating.
To feel a much part of the time as a happy and free person controlling your own life, you must choose a profession that will become your passion, which will be felt as a calling and even as entertainment. In this case, you do not have to spread the work and personal life to different poles. Combine them as much as possible. Enjoy work when you are at home, go on business trips as a vacation. Instead of waiting for one big pension at the end of life, arrange a “mini-pension” all year round. Instead of thinking that at work you get tired, and on vacation – relax, be mobile always, connect travel, work and personal life.
Have a clear idea of your whole life and what you want from it. Find something you’ll be obsessed with, something you can’t help but do that will give you a sense of purpose and self-respect, something If it doesn’t meet these requirements, throw it away.
Give up all things that are of no importance to you. When you drop a ball, it’s called weakness.
But sometimes the desire to stop indicates that this activity is not really so important to you. Why keep doing something simply because failure will seem like a weakness, or because you’ve almost reached your goal (which doesn’t mean anything to you)?
I decided to study to be an architect and after two weeks I realized that this is not what I want to do. For the next 154 weeks, I kept walking because I didn’t want anyone i don’t know to say behind my back that I had given up. They didn’t even know me, so why did I care about their opinion? It’s very strange. I did something stupid without stopping on time. Incomplete three years cost me almost six years of missed opportunities, which would probably lead me to something significant.
Step aside and say no. Don’t do something or become someone simply because other people expect it. Let them go, let them fly. not forgetting, however, about tact and modesty.