1% Better Every Day (part 6/6)
Finding Balance
Kaizen is all about improving efficiency and optimizing your workflow and lifestyle to achieve more. This is a great way to approach your lifestyle, but it can also have its drawbacks. After all, if all you ever do is to make your lifestyle more and more efficient, you’ll eventually miss out on the simple things in life: like relaxing on the couch with your partner, or watching junk TV. How about going out with friends for coffee?
Some “self-help” books will tell you that you should completely cut these kinds of waste activities out. That you should grind and grind and grind to achieve the things you want.
I disagree. And 1 believe that for kaizen to work, you also need to find balance.
Input and Output
If your only focus is your work, then you’ll lose inspiration. Try to think of yourself as a kind of ‘input/output’ machine. Watching films and playing games isn’t a waste of time – it’s a source of inspiration and creativity. If you only output, then you’ll eventually run out of steam and run out of creative juices. It’s why you often do your best work when you return after a few days off.
Likewise, spending time with other people and relaxing is a very important way to recharge. Your energy is a finite resource. It’s also a very important skill worth cultivating in its own right. Success these days is determined very much by ‘soft skills and the ability to get on with anyone, and being able to just switch off is a crucial survival skill.
Staying Positive
Some of the most valuable attributes for an entrepreneur, an athlete, or anyone else working toward a far-off vision are positivity, persistence, and self-confidence. You need to be able to take your lumps when things don’t turn out the way you hoped, and you need to be able to jump straight back on that horse. If you have a large network of friends and family that you love and trust, hobbies that you can’t wait to spend more time on, and the ability to sometimes just relax – then staying positive becomes much easier.
And that gives you the optimism and courage to try all over again. How much better do you feel after a day with friends? These experiences are the stuff that life is made of and it’s nourishing for the soul.
If your business, your job, your training, or your art are all you have, then a setback in this area of your life can be devastating. You might just give up entirely.
Make the Most of Now
While it might sound a little morbid, the last thing to remember is that you never know what’s just around the corner. You might not make it to the age where you get to enjoy the fruits of your labor. Thus, you may never get to enjoy that indulgent lifestyle or to rebuild those relationships.
And the irony is that most of us wouldn’t enjoy a lifestyle of pure relaxation and decadence either – I love writing and learning and training and I plan never to retire. We’re happiest when we find balance. Working toward a goal gives us a purpose – the journey is often more exciting than the destination anyway - while spending time with friends and family, or taking a moment to read a good book, will keep us grounded.
As any stoic might point out, many of us will strive hard toward an obscure notion of ‘success, so much so that we miss out on the opportunity to be happy right now. In fact, traditional success often just makes it harder to spend time with friends or pursue pet projects.
Stop and take a look around: you’ve probably got an awful lot to be proud of already. If you never take the time to enjoy the life you’ve already built, you’ll probably never be satisfied and any success that comes will have far less meaning.
So, guess all I’m trying to say is this: don’t feel guilty the next time you take the evening off to be with your family, or the next time you pig out on a piece of cake. Whatever productivity ‘gurus’ might say.
This is as important to your mission as the mission itself.
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Have a lovely day