Hey Friends,
Second edition of the new format (one day late, sorry). A lot of you replied to last month’s essay with some version of the same worry: I know roughly where I am headed, but right now my life is completely lopsided and I feel like I am failing at it.
This month I want to talk about that lopsidedness, because I think most of us are measuring it all wrong.
Balance is a lie.
Somewhere in the first few weeks of this year I found myself in the kitchen at four in the morning, grabbing a pacified from the steriliser and my phone in the other, staring at a notification telling me I had missed a workout session from a plan I had written in December for a man who no longer existed.
Four sessions a week. Zone two on the days between. Protein targets. A good plan, and at that moment a completely delusional one. Our daughter had arrived, I was midway through navigating a promotion/role change, and for a stretch of this year my health goals did not step back politely. They were shoved off the stage.
I felt bad about that for longer than I should have. Which is odd, because nothing had actually gone wrong. A baby had arrived. That is the most predictable disruption in human history. What had gone wrong was my expectation, and the expectation had a name.
I was still chasing balance.
The fantasy we have been sold.
You know the video. Somebody wakes at five, plunges into cold water, does ninety minutes of deep work, trains, cooks something with visible macros, sees friends, reads twenty pages, asleep by ten.
Here is what nobody says out loud. That was filmed across four or five days and stitched into one. The friends were a Thursday. The workout was a Monday. What you are watching is not a day, it is a highlight reel with a timestamp glued on top. Films do the same at a different scale. They end at the wedding, before anyone has to negotiate whose turn it is to do the four in the morning shift. Happily ever after is not a state, it is an edit point.
We grow up with those two pictures, then compare our actual Tuesday to both and conclude we are doing it wrong.
Nothing that grows does balance.
A field is not balanced. It is sown, harvested, and then left fallow while it looks, to the untrained eye, like nothing at all is happening. That fallow stretch is not the failure state. It is the part that makes the next harvest possible. A field producing at maximum every month of the year is not balanced. It is being strip mined, and it will tell you so in about five years.
Trees drop their leaves. Muscle grows in the recovery, never in the session. Nothing alive reaches equilibrium by doing a bit of everything in equal measure, all the time. It gets there by taking turns.
The word for that is not balance. It is seasons.
Zoom out until the picture makes sense.
Try scoring your finances, time, health, relationships and mind on a single Wednesday. It is nonsense. Any given Wednesday is dominated by whatever is loudest, and the loudest thing is almost never the most important thing.
Now score them across a quarter. You can see that the gym went quiet in February and came back in April. That you barely saw friends in May because of a deadline, but June had two good weekends in it. That is not imbalance. That is a life with a pulse.
So here is the first shift: balance is not a daily state, it is a lagging indicator, and the smallest honest unit of measurement is about a quarter. Zoom in too far and every life looks broken.
The two quarter rule.
Pull up the last six months. Which area has been at the centre, and which has been sitting in the back seat?
If the back seat area changes from quarter to quarter, you are fine. Health took a hit while work was mad, then work eased and health returned, then a family thing took over for six weeks. That is rotation. That is how it is meant to look.
But if the same area has been in the back seat for two consecutive quarters or more, and you cannot name the date it comes forward again, you are not in a season. You are in a lifestyle, and you chose it by not choosing it.
That is the whole distinction. A season is bounded. A lifestyle is permanent. They feel identical from the inside for about eight months, and then they stop feeling identical at all.
To be clear, I am not against intensity. I am not remotely against two or three brutal years in a job that pays extraordinarily well and eats your social life. Early compounding is real. There are chapters where the right move is to go all in and let everything else run on a skeleton crew. The condition is that you named it, you priced it, and you wrote down when it ends.
What the bill looks like when nobody pays it
Some debts are genuinely repayable. Lose a quarter of training and you claw most of it back in a few months. Savings and skills largely speaking forgive you if you come back reasonably soon. Others bills are less forgiving.
Friendships never end in an argument. They end in a slow thinning of invitations. Nobody messages to tell you that you have been dropped. You simply notice, three years in, that you are hearing about the trip afterwards rather than being asked about the dates.
Your body is patient right up until it is not. A quarter off is nothing. Six years off, from thirty to thirty six, is not a pause you resume from. You come back to a lower starting line, with less muscle and a version of yourself that has forgotten it ever trained.
Marriages rarely collapse, they drift. Two people slowly become excellent logistics coordinators for a shared enterprise. Nobody is unhappy exactly, which is precisely what makes it so easy to leave for one more quarter.
And some things are simply non renewable. Your child is three years old exactly once. Your parents are well enough to travel for a finite number of summers. Those debts do not get repaid, they get written off, and you carry the write off quietly for a long time.
Then the one I find most unsettling. Stay in an intense season long enough and it stops being something you do and becomes something you are. The soft season you kept promising yourself finally arrives, and you find you cannot feel it.
Establish floors, not balance.
So what do you aim at during a lopsided stretch? Floors.
The season sets the ceiling. You do not get to decide how high health goes during the quarter your baby is still learning how to sleep. You absolutely do however get to decide how low it falls.
A floor is small, non negotiable and deliberately unambitious. Two twenty minute sessions a week, not four hours. One proper call with a friend a fortnight, not a social calendar. Seven hours of sleep as the default rather than the reward.
Floors are unglamorous, and that is the point. They are not there to make progress. They keep the thing alive so that when the season turns you are restarting rather than rebuilding, and you only discover which one you are doing when you try.
How I now leverage floors.
Monthly, one line per area. Money, time, health, relationships, mind. No strict routine, no scoreboard to keep. Just a simple floor to maintain.
Quarterly, three questions:
Which area sat in the back seat?
How many consecutive quarters has it been there?
And if the answer is two or more, what is the date it comes forward, and what has to be true for that date to be real?
That last question does all the work. Without a date and a condition, you do not have a plan. You have a hope, and hope has a poor record against a calendar.
One question to take into your month ahead:
Which part of your life has been in the back seat for more than two quarters, and can you name the actual date it comes forward again?
If you can name the date in the not so distant future, you are in a season and you are fine. If you cannot, you have found the thing worth thinking about this month.
Sit with it. Reply and tell me what came up, if you fancy. I read everything.
See you on the last Sunday of next month,
Yath
This month I’m enjoying
Apple Studio Display: A cheeky upgrade and one that was totally unnecessary but it looks really good and works flawlessly with my Apple ecosystem.
Fitbit Air: Google has created something awesome. I know Apple will follow in the next 3 years but until then this device will do. It’s so mighty yet lightweight.
Build: This is Tony Fadell’s excellent book on product management and building awesome products. He was responsible for the iPod at Apple.