You Can’t Have Work-Life Balance if You Want to be Extraordinary

Use this strategy instead

The idea of work-life balance is counterproductive at best and dangerous at worst, yet you’re told to focus on it.

There are some motivational hucksters out there who will say things like ‘don’t sleep’ ‘work 16 hours a day’ ‘hustle til your eyes bleed’ etc. and those strategies can lead to burning out.

On the other hand, this idea that you need to be balanced and constantly recharge yourself is BS. It’s not going to lead to the life you want and it will have more of a negative impact on your mental health in the long run.

Let me explain.

How to Save Your Life by Living Unbalanced

For five years, I lived an unbalanced life. I woke up at 5 a.m. or so daily to write for anywhere from 1–3 hours before I had to go to work. I worked on weekends, most weekends.

I’d work during lunch breaks — answering emails, doing calls, and writing. I became obsessed with the idea of becoming a full-time writer and spent a lot of my spare time working on that goal.

My wife at the time worried that I’d never get enough success — that I’d push and push and push no matter what. On the outside looking in, I didn’t appear balanced.

The way I looked at it though? I knew an unbalanced life would lead to a life where I’d have plenty of time to find balance. And that’s exactly what happened.

Now? How many hours per day do I work? However many I feel like working. Some days I’ll be in the zone to the point I will work a 12–14 hour day. Some days I’ll work my required four hours and just stop.

I don’t have so much income that I can avoid working altogether, but because I spent five years living an unbalanced life, I get to live and work with a degree of freedom most people don’t have.

This is why I tell you the balanced life is BS.

Let’s say you decide to remain balanced your whole life — never putting in extra hours to your side business, never learning new and profitable skills, never extending yourself outside the comfort zone of your 9 to 5, and living for the weekends — what do you get?

You get to live in limbo, in the middle, in perpetuity. The limbo, the middle, is always the worst position to be in because you get worked to death slowly.

Each little moment of those groundhog days wears on you bit by bit. Life in the middle isn’t tragic at all. It’s death by a thousand cuts of banality.

Then you snap out of it and realize you’ve been wasting your life, but you don’t feel like you have the energy to do anything about it. All that re-charging, for nothing.

No one is saying work yourself to the bone, but this idea that one hundred percent of the time outside of your job should be spent re-charging is nonsense. On top of it, most people don’t even know how to do that well.

Avoid the Middle at All Costs

If you wanted to maximize your potential, you’d live your life like this. When you’re on, when you’re working, you’re one hundred percent into what you’re doing, zoned in, flow state active.

When you’re off, you’re one hundred percent turned off, just enjoying the moment for what it is with total presence — time with family, time with friends, time just doing nothing but fully enjoying it.

Most people operate in limbo from start to finish and sap their energy throughout an entire day. You go to work for eight hours a day. If you’re in an office setting, you work two to three hours of actual work, tops.

You feel so burnt from work, not because you’ve actually done all that much, but because you’ve switched tasks constantly.

For other professions, hell, you just feel tired. Often, in non-white collar jobs, you have to do repetitive work that sort of numbs the mind as opposed to being fully engaged.

So either way, rarely do you find people fully focused and immersed in a task they enjoy throughout the day.

You go throughout your day either distracted or numb, energy being sapped. Then you probably go home and watch T.V. to distract yourself, scarf unhealthy food into your body, and spend a bunch of time on your phone instead of interacting or engaging.

I’m painting a caricature and over-generalizing to make a point. We live in this culture that rewards you for doing nothing of real consequence from the time you wake up til the time you go to bed.

And we wonder why society is experiencing these high levels of anxiety. A life filled with busy work under the guise of balance causes mental imbalance, apathy, and gets people stuck in a rut.

What’s the alternative?

The Recipe to Building Your Dreams Without Burning Out

The alternative is simple. Create a focused time-block in your day where you work on something compelling, engaging, and meaningful.

Supplement your day with this activity, making yourself ‘unbalanced,’ until this little time-blocked hobby becomes something substantial.

I did this with writing. I’d wake up early to write, then go to my actual job, then come home. My workdays would be around 12 hours or so, but the way I stacked them made the process easier.

I did my deepest work that required the most cognition earliest in the morning, both for my side hustle and my real job. Afternoons would be mostly managerial stuff.

By the time I got home, I was ‘worn out,’ but part of that energy expenditure went toward a worthy goal, which made it easier to wake up and do it all over again. That, plus I did like my job as a marketing director at a digital company, so the things I did throughout the day interested me.

See, you only get burned out when you’re working on stuff that doesn’t interest you, stuff that doesn’t align with who you are as a person, stuff that doesn’t give you a sense of meaning. Focus on what you’re working on as opposed to how long you work on it and you’ll solve the balance issue.

If you’re stuck in a job you tolerate, dislike, or hate, you’re going to have to use your time block outside of work as a safe haven for your mind. You must protect that bubble of time at all costs to keep you sane enough to pull off the mission.

Your mission is to do whatever it takes to eventually have a life where you don’t have to do things you don’t want to do — the ultimate form of balance. You’re making a tradeoff.

So the trade is a few years of ‘unbalanced’ living for the rest of your life. In the long run, you win versus the people who try to find daily balance and end up in a state of limbo til they croak.

Look, if you’re not in a position of control over your life, perhaps now is not the time to rest. Again, it doesn’t mean you have to hustle until you’re exhausted, but if you don’t put in extra time toward a better end, you’re going to be stuck in the same place forever and you don’t want that.

When you’re engaged in a project that compels you, all of a sudden you’ll have a lot more energy. You won’t need to worry about balance because you’ll be so focused the idea doesn’t even enter your mind.

Find something to work on. Work on it. This is the recipe.

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