In 2013, I attended a tech conference in Las Vegas. I’d never heard of the keynote speaker, and I don’t remember his name now. He walked onto the stage in a humdrum kind of way and began introducing his talk. Two sentences in, he stopped himself — part of his act, although none of us could have known that at the time,—removed his suit jacket, slung it over his shoulder, and walked offstage with some comment about starting over.
As soon as he disappeared stage right, loud music started playing. A few seconds later, he came running back onto the stage and executed three or four back handsprings before flying into the air for a backflip, landing just a few feet from the podium.
Throughout his presentation, he juggled a dozen balls at once. He juggled knives. He rode a unicycle. Eventually, because apparently none of those things was dangerous on its own, he juggled knives as he rode the unicycle.
He told us about learning to ride it, and how he had tried more than one hundred times just to stay in the seat and remain in motion for a few seconds. He described his method for learning to juggle, which I later employed religiously until I could also juggle. I never progressed beyond three objects, and certainly never anything that might lead to a trip to the emergency room.
The entire point of his presentation was simple: live life off balance on purpose.
There are various camps in the world when it comes to how we should spend our lives. There are those pitching serenity, margin, boundaries, and a life protected from anything that interferes with self-care. On the opposite end is hustle culture, which teaches us to be all-in and all-on, nearly all the time.
My temperament is more toward the latter.
There is an uncomfortable truth that lives in Mr. Unicycle-rider-knife-juggler’s statement: excellence usually requires imbalance.
A concert pianist doesn’t reach the highest levels of her craft by giving the piano a “equitable” portion of her time. Instead, she spends hours upon hours every day seated with her fingers on the keys, repeating difficult passages until her hands can perform something like the “Scarbo” movement of Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit with incomprehensible precision.
Professional athletes structure huge portions of their lives around training, nutrition, recovery, repetition, and competition, sometimes for the sake of shaving fractions of a second off a personal best.
Artists, entrepreneurs, researchers, musicians, writers, and people pursuing mastery in almost any field routinely devote disproportionate amounts of time to the thing they are trying to create or become.
None of those people achieve unusual excellence by maintaining even a semblance of balance.
One thing that’s worth highlighting. There is an important difference between focused imbalance and indiscriminate overload.
Focused imbalance is choosing, for some period of time, to give something important outsized attention over everything else. Indiscriminate overload is trying to give everything important that same level of attention at once.
The first one can produce mastery while the second one mostly produces exhaustion.
Unfortunately, most of us probably live in the second state.
Even when we’re not trying to become world-class at anything, life moves at a frenetic pace. There’s school and homework, recreational sports and competitive sports, music lessons, grocery shopping, caring for aging parents or sick family members, community service, religious worship, exercise, sleep, work, hobbies, friendships, marriage, children, household maintenance, finances, and keeping up with all the emails, Tweets, Snaps, DMs, and whatever other notifications are pounding our phones incessantly.
And, it’s true. There are a lot of worthwhile things clamoring for our attention. And because they are worthwhile, ther’s a very real temptation to attempt all of them.
I make that attempt on a near-daily basis.
A few weeks ago, I was simultaneously working with four different AI agents on four different projects for four different clients. Each agent was doing something productive and each of those projects mattered in the context of addressing a client’s legitimate needs. I had, with the help of wonderful and terrifying modern technology, engineered an impressively sophisticated way to divide my attenion to the point that it was no longer useful. In my opinion, our brains were not built to context switch that much, but it didn’t stop me from trying.
When we look at our lives from the outside, everything we do can seem like competing demands, and in a practical sense they are. But from the inside, I think most things we give our time to represent different parts of the life we actually want: building, earning, creating, learning, teaching, serving, caring, enduring, contributing, and occasionally proving to ourselves that we can still do hard things.
That, candidly, is what makes this such a difficult problem.
The things overwhelming us are not always meaningless distractions. Much of the time, they are things we genuinely value.
Danger lurks in the fact that every worthwhile thing can become too much when all of them demand primacy at once.
David A. Bednar recently wrote, “Sometimes we reflect on all of our responsibilities at home, school, work, and church and wonder how we can achieve a balance among the many competing demands on our time. Instead of driving ourselves crazy trying to do everything at the same time, we should identify the few fundamental things that are our highest priorities. We then can strive to give each of them the attention they need — one at a time.”
The advice is incredibly simple, which is probably why I ignore it most days.
When I stop to consider my own life, it’s remarkable how frequently I take a complicated and protracted path toward solving a problem when a much simpler, readily available solution is sitting directly in front of me.
Here is a good example.
Because I work for multiple clients, I have many tasks associated with each one. Some take a few minutes. Others require days or weeks of effort. A simple piece of paper with a list of tasks would probably be enough to keep track of them.
So naturally, I built an entire software program.
It was a satisfying project. It also consumed several hours I could have spent completing the tasks the software was designed to help me track.
There is something almost comical about our tendency to complicate the management of complexity, and maybe balance suffers from the same problem.
We imagine balance as an equilibrium where everything important receives its required share of time at the same time: work, family, health, faith, sleep, friendships, hobbies, service, and personal growth, all somehow maintained at exactly the right level.
We all know life doesn’t work that way. At all.
There are seasons when work requires more of us. There are seasons when family does. Sometimes our health suddenly moves to the front of the line whether we want it to or not. There are periods when a project deserves unusual attention, when someone we love needs more of us, or when the most responsible thing we can do is just go to bed.
I think the objective of balance is knowing what deserves to receive the outsized attention right now. It’s not making the attempt to keep everything level all at once.
The unicycle-riding knife-juggler on that stage in Las Vegas wasn’t holding twelve balls or three knives in equilibrium. At any given moment, most of them were in the air, outside of his control. He dealt with each one when it returned to his hands, the let it go again so he could catch the next.
When we look at from that vantage point, balance is more sequence than simultaneity. It’s deciding what deserves our attention right now, giving it what it needs, and accepting that something else has to remain airborne for a while.
It still requires judgement. There is such a thing as giving too much of ourselves to one pursuit for too long, and pursuing too many things simultaneously is a reliable path toward burnout. I know this because most mornings I wake up with some degree of existential dread about the number of things I intend to accomplish before going back to bed.
The fundamental truth that I struggle to accept is that I have to stop demanding that every priority be in first place.
It’s probably time I took Bednar’s advice and identified “the few fundamental things that are [my] highest priorities.”
I can probably create an app for that.
