So I was needlessly wasting time on Facebook the other day when a great friend of mine linked up this video on Ted that is a talk from Nigel Marsh on the work/life balance. Ironically, this is a topic that has been at the forefront of my brain for some time.
I am an all or nothing kind of person. I hit everything in my life 110% or nothing which leaves very little room for balance. As I continue to get older and start looking at starting a family with my wife, I am coming to the gripping realization that I can not keep burning both ends of the match for forever. If I really want to have a successful, happy and full life, I have to start to learn how to not only balance work and life, but delegate tasks and give up some of my control.
The process of making work not run your life is not an easy one and it can not be done all at once. Currently, I am looking into using VA’s for a lot of my business tasks to free up time to focus on growth and planning. The future is in efficiency…not longer hours.
What Marsh goes on to illustrate in this video…that I suggest everyone listens to (not long…only about 10 minutes)…is that we are caught in a race that we can not win. We constantly put off living until a later date by stretching ourselves too thin in the present. Part of this is the structure of our workplaces, but a large sum of it boils down to our want and desire for someone to swoop in from the heavens and fix it for us.
We have to start looking within ourselves to fix the issues of our lives. The work/life balance is something only we can fix through changing our attitudes and actions. In the end…this is our one and only shot at living life to the fullest and the little moments can matter the most.
And most of all, people need to stop “working long, hard hours, at jobs they hate to enable them to buy things they don’t need, to impress people they don’t like. ”
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