Work-life Balance is a Myth
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It’s hard to believe that anything worthwhile of achieving has resulted from someone’s 70% effort. In fact, I don’t believe it. Instead, I believe that working extremely hard is a prerequisite for accomplishing any large, impressive, and difficult feat.
People talk about work-life balance like it’s a concept that everyone must subscribe to, but life is a choose-your-own adventure game where each person is able to forge their own path. It therefore follows, that first, everyone must make a decision: what would you like to accomplish? From this decision, someone’s work-life balance can be vaguely bucketed with reasonable goals yielding reasonable balance. The more you’d like to achieve the less work-life balance you should expect; at least for some significant portion of time.
From this point forward, I will assume that you’ve elected to attempt achieving something of significance; something that requires hard work. The reality of work-life balance is that it’s a sliding scale. There will be seasons of your life where it swings more in the direction of work and other seasons where it heavily favors life. Because of this, your goal shouldn’t be to avoid the scale from sliding, but rather to strategize when the scale tilts in a particular direction.
In my own lived experience, your 20s are the perfect time to elect to work extremely hard. In your 20s you’re most likely to be time rich and cash poor, whereas in most of the following decades, you’ll swap to being cash rich and time poor. Because of this, you should use your 20s to explore the possibilities of what you’d like to do. While you might have an idea in your head, it’ll likely change as you:
Explore that idea
Experience new things
The more you’re able to try, the faster you’ll discover what you’d like to focus on. Since you’re time rich, you’ll be able to say yes to a lot of opportunities and, in turn, these opportunities will teach you lessons, good and bad.
Earlier this year, I officially entered my 30s and what I believe so far is that this decade is the time in my life where I’ll say no to most things in order to focus on the few things my 20s has taught me. Wandering in my 20s helped shape my decision to go all-in on creating content and building software and businesses. I believe this decade will, like my 20s, also require extreme amounts of work, but now that work will be consolidated into only the ventures I decide to pursue.
While I believe working hard is paramount to maximize the chances of getting what you want out of life, I believe it all needs to be in service of some larger goal.
“Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.” - EinsteinMy end goal is to be able to decide what I want to do, when I want to do it, where I want to do it from, and who I want to do it with. I feel confident that working hard in my 30s with a narrow focus will help me achieve this. I’m tilting the scale towards work now so that I can spend as much time as possible doing exactly what I want in the near future.
The trick is not to avoid working hard, but to discover what you don’t mind working hard at. Luckily, for me, I’ve found it and I’m ready to work.
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