In Charles Dickens’ famous story A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge was visited by three ghosts: the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. These three ghosts came to Scrooge to open his eyes and enlighten him about the true nature of his past, his present, and his future.

Scrooge’s worldview was distorted, and he was on a path to a miserable future. The ghosts helped him achieve clarity, and Scrooge was able to decide on a better path. It changed his life.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much chance of three ghosts showing up in our own lives to put us on the right path. Luckily, we can run a little thought experiment to help us gain clarity for ourselves.

Ask yourself three questions.

1. What would the Ghost of Christmas Past show you?
2. What would the Ghost of Christmas Present show you?
3. What would the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come show you?

Try to see things as the ghosts would see them, which means from an outsider’s perspective. Sometimes it is difficult to think clearly about ourselves. The ghosts that visited Scrooge didn’t sugarcoat reality. They showed him a brutally honest vision of his reality. As harsh as it was, it was the most compassionate thing that they could do for him. We need to apply this same type of brutal honesty to our own lives if we want to change our paths.

The Ghost of Christmas Present can provide clarity about the reality of your current condition. The Ghost of Christmas Past can enlighten you about how you got here. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come can show you where your current path is taking you.

Do you like what you see?

If not, never fear. Instead, listen to Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven:

“Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run
There’s still time to change the road you’re on.”

There is a lot of debate over whether you should work on your strengths or your weaknesses. You are in luck, because I am going to answer the question for you. Should you work on your strengths or your weaknesses? ABSOLUTELY. Okay, so that’s probably not the answer that you were looking for, and you might be asking yourself “What kind of answer is that?”

The problem is that we are looking for a cut-and-dried answer where none exists. I think too often we are interested in looking for the holy grail of rules of thumb that apply universally and spare us the need to think. Unfortunately, they don’t exist. Rules of thumb tend to be very suboptimal because they are not very responsive to varying situations.

Strengths vs. Weaknesses

In the book The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss writes:

“It is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor. The choice is between multiplication of results using strengths or incremental improvement fixing weaknesses that will, at best, become mediocre. Focus on better use of your best weapons instead of constant repair.”

With all due respect to Tim Ferriss, I think this is extremely overgeneralized. Sometimes our weaknesses can wipe out any possible chance of success. One extreme example is that of someone who is addicted to drugs. Odds are that focusing on strengths is not going to be enough to overcome this weakness. The weakness would likely doom this person to failure.

If your weakness is that you live beyond your means, increasing your means (i.e. your income) isn’t likely to make you successful. In fact, it will just get you into bigger trouble. Just look at all the celebrities and athletes that end up in bankruptcy. When you consider the multimillion dollar incomes that they enjoy, it seems crazy that they ever could go bankrupt. It happens all the time because they use debt to spend even more than they earn.

An Example from My Own Life

One of my weaknesses was — and still is, although to a lesser extent — a lack of patience. I ended up bouncing around from job to job mainly because I didn’t have the patience to stick with them. I would always get frustrated and stressed out until I finally quit. It was never because I couldn’t do the job, but actually quite the opposite. I did a great job and was too impatient (and often bored) to rise through the ranks

Interestingly enough, I ended up becoming a corporate controller at the young age of 30, but lost my job when my company was acquired. My impatience almost ended up working in my favor in this case, and I’m probably actually fortunate that it didn’t, or else I might not have learned an important lesson.

Unfortunately, I never had another job lined up when I would quit, and I wasn’t eligible for unemployment benefits, so I began to accumulate debt. I always rationalized the debt by telling myself that I would soon have a good paying job, and it would be no problem. After the dotcom crash, jobs were much harder to come by, especially jobs that I was interested in.

Eventually, I tried to start my own business, but it was more out of frustration and impatience than anything else. The business was poorly planned and capitalized, which also led to a lack of commitment on my part. I soon found myself in a heap of debt.

My financial difficulty was severe enough that it caused me to do some soul searching. I wanted to figure out the underlying causes behind my situation. I came up with a number of answers. I had never been extravagant, so that wasn’t the cause of my financial difficulties. The main problem was a lack of consistency when it came to working, which was driven by a lack of patience.

Once I addressed this root problem, I was able to turn things around. Now I’m completely debt free with a decent cash buffer and a 2008 Subaru that I bought new and paid off already.

The point is simple. Fixing certain weaknesses can be critical to your success.

What about your strengths?

It should be pretty clear that we need to focus on some of our weaknesses, but this doesn’t mean that we should just ignore our strengths. For one thing, Tim Ferriss was right when he said that it is more fun to leverage our strengths. We tend to be intrinsically motivated to do things we are good at.

Aside from the enjoyment of focusing on our strengths, it is also an area where we can create competitive advantages. Sometimes even small improvements over the competition can have a huge impact on your success. Think about runners in the 100 meter dash. The top runners are those who consistently beat others by only fractions of a second.

So should you work on your strengths or your weaknesses?

ABSOLUTELY. It’s not one or the other. Use your ability to reason to determine what areas would most benefit you. Focus on the weaknesses that you think have the greatest chance of really holding you back while also remembering to focus on the strengths that you can really use to move forward.

I like movies with badasses. Most badasses have courage, conviction, determination, focus, toughness, and a mission. They often exhibit leadership and never quit. My favorite movie badasses are often those that might not be the best people in the world. They may be flawed, but they have some kind of underlying goodness about them. Sometimes they start out as model citizens, but something pisses them off, and they turn badass. Other times the person might be a jerk, but in the end, their goodness shows through. Typically, they are very human, but also heroic.

Here are some of my favorite movie badasses and some badass quotes (in order of actor’s last name):

Bruce Wayne/Batman (Christian Bale) – Batman Begins

Henri Ducard: “Your compassion is a weakness your enemies will not share.”
Bruce Wayne: “That’s why it’s so important. It separates us from them.”

King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) – 300

King Leonidas: “You bring the crowns and heads of conquered kings to my city steps. You insult my queen. You threaten my people with slavery and death! Oh, I’ve chosen my words carefully, Persian. Perhaps you should have done the same!”
Messenger: “This is blasphemy! This is madness!”
King Leonidas: “Madness? THIS… IS… SPARTA!!!”

Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) – Law Abiding Citizen

“I’m just getting warmed up. This is von Clausewitz shit. Total fucking war. I’m gonna pull the whole thing down. I’m gonna bring the whole fucking diseased, corrupt temple down on your head. It’s gonna be biblical.”

Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell) – Army of Darkness

Old Witch: “I’ll swallow your soul!”
Ash: “Come get some.”

Wyatt Earp (Kevin Costner) – Wyatt Earp

Lynch mob leader: “You arrogant son of a bitch. You think you can stop all of us?”
Wyatt Earp: “You boys can get me. That won’t be any problem with all the guns you got here. But I’m taking 10 or 12 of you with me. Starting with you, Dick Gird. And you, McGee. Maybe you, too, Harvey. So if any of you want Tommy… and you want me… come up front with these brave men… and we’ll all go together.”

Dirty Harry (Clint Eastwood) – Dirty Harry series

“I know what you’re thinking: ‘Did he fire six shots or only five?’ Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?”

Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood) – Gran Torino

“Yeah, I blow a hole in your face and then I go in the house. And I sleep like a baby. You can count on that. We used to stack fucks like you 5 feet high in Korea, use ya for sand bags.”

The Stranger (Clint Eastwood) – High Plains Drifter

“You’re going to look pretty silly with that knife sticking out of your ass.”

William Munny (Clint Eastwood) – Unforgiven

“You better bury Ned right!… Better not cut up, nor otherwise harm no whores… or I’ll come back and kill every one of you sons of bitches!”

William Wallace (Mel Gibson) – Braveheart

“Lower your flags and march straight back to England, stopping at every home you pass by to beg forgiveness for a hundred years of theft, rape, and murder. Do that and your men shall live. Do it not, and every one of you will die today.”

Eric Draven (Brandon Lee) – The Crow

Albrecht: “You’re the guy that murdered Tin-Tin.”
Eric Draven: “He was already dead. He died a year ago the moment he touched her. They’re all dead. They just don’t know it yet.”

Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) – Fight Club

“All the ways you wish you could be, that’s me. I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not.”

Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames) – Pulp Fiction

“What now? Let me tell you what now. I’ma call a coupla hard, pipe-hittin’ niggas to go to work on the homes here with a pair of pliers and a blow torch. You hear me talkin’, hillbilly boy? I ain’t through with you by a damn sight. I’ma get medieval on your ass.”

John J. Rambo (Sylvestor Stallone) – First Blood series

“I could have killed ‘em all. I could kill you. In town, you’re the law. Out here, it’s me. Don’t push it. Don’t push it or I’ll give you a war you won’t believe. Let it go. Let it go.”

Rocky Balboa (Sylvestor Stallone) – Rocky series

Clubber Lang: “I’m going to bust you up.”
Rocky Balboa: “Go for it.”

Alex Murphy/RoboCop (Peter Weller) – RoboCop

“Dead or alive, you’re coming with me.”

I’m sure there are plenty more.

Who are some of your favorite movie badasses?

This Week’s Posts

03/01/10 – Design Your Life to Get More of What You Want
03/02/10 – Is it TIME you lack or is it FOCUS?
03/03/10 – Going Digital.
03/04/10 – Do Your Habits Support Your Goals?

From around the Web

Scott H. Young – You’re Lazier Than You Think
focus manifesto – focus : a simplicity manifesto in the age of distraction
Zen Habits (Scott H Young guest post) – How I Was Able to Ace Exams Without Studying
OPEN Forum – How to Get Things Right

Do you set goals and start to work on them only to soon quit? Do you have trouble maintaining momentum over a long period of time? Don’t feel bad. It happens to the best of us. The reason, as Scott H. Young explained, is that you’re lazier than you think. That might not sound very positive or supportive. His point is that our plans typically rely on willpower to achieve our goals, and willpower is not reliable.

The problem is that willpower always runs out. There is only so long that you can push the huge boulder up the hill. Just like Sisyphus, the boulder is doomed to roll back down over and over again. In this case, the boulder that you are fighting is your old habits. Battling old habits uses up your finite supply of willpower.

The Power of Habit

I would like you to do a little experiment. Take a different route on the way to work today (or on the way home). If you have been taking the same route for a long time, it will be solidly conditioned into a habit. It will actually be difficult to change your route. Unless you remember to immediately take a different turn than you normally would, there is a very good chance that you will automatically go your normal route before you realize it.

Have you ever done this before? On several occasions I have set out to go to the store in the direction of my work office only to find myself driving towards work instead of the store. The habit becomes so ingrained that your behavior becomes completely unconscious. I don’t even think about the turns I need to make to go to work or to get home. I just go on autopilot.

Try a second experiment. Use your opposite hand the next time you brush your teeth. You will notice that it feels very awkward and that you have to consciously think about it, whereas if you use your dominant hand  you don’t need to think about it much. When you are using your dominant hand, your mind will probably be thinking about something else entirely.

Mother Nature has equipped us with the ability to develop habits so that we don’t need to consciously think through everything we do. This frees our mind for things that require more mindpower. The challenge is that most of our habits were developed unconsciously. We didn’t consciously set out to develop most of our habits, and the result is that many of our habits don’t serve us. They work against us, and that includes working against our efforts to achieve goals.

Align Your Habits with Your Goals

We don’t need to bemoan the fact that our habits are working against us. We can use this knowledge to our advantage in creating an effective goal achievement strategy. Think about a goal that you would like to achieve, and ask yourself:

What habits do I need to develop to put the achievement of this goal on autopilot?

Instead of depending on willpower, which is essentially a conscious struggle to overcome your conditioned habits, develop new habits that will help make your goal achievement more effortless. The stronger you can condition the new habit, the less you will have to think about the new behavior, and the more effortless and consistent your behavior will become.

What one habit can you begin to develop to help you achieve your most important goal?

In my post Design Your Life to Get More of What You Want, I mentioned that minimalism is one of my areas of focus. One area of minimalism that I want to achieve is to go completely paperless. I actually began this transition many years ago, but I have never made it a deliberate process. The progress that I have made has been slow and incremental. My goal now is to “go digital” completely, by which I mean that all the documents that I want to maintain are stored electronically.

The Dream of a Paperless Office Begins

I remember reading about the idea of paperless offices all the way back in eighth grade (1982-1983), and I was intrigued. This is when personal computers really started to grow in popularity, especially in the business world. Many technology experts predicted that it wouldn’t be long before all documents would be stored digitally, and offices would become paperless.

The interesting thing is that the exact opposite happened! Computer technology made it vastly more efficient to create reports and other documents, so that is exactly what people did. Then they printed them out, sent them around, and stored them in physical files. Not exactly what the technologists had in mind!

There were several problems that prevented people from going paperless. One was plain old habit. If you have been working in an office for many years, you have already developed your own habitual ways of doing things that work for you. When you are already extremely busy, it is difficult to reinvent processes.

Secondly, the technology simply wasn’t very convenient. As an accountant, I know that although most accountants now spend a lot of time working with electronic spreadsheets like Excel, they also still love to work with paper. It’s still easier to annotate a spreadsheet with a pencil than it is to do it electronically.

The Tide is Turning

Slowly we are seeing a transition away from paper. E-mails have quickly replaced memos and letters as the preferred method of written communications. More people are opting for electronic statements instead of paper statements. As technology improves, people are developing better strategies for going digital. The trick is to change your mindset from a paper mindset to a digital mindset.

Ideas for Going Completely Digital

• Stop printing stuff. Most of the time it is completely unnecessary. We often print it out for the sole reason of storing it. Why? Mostly out of habit. We feel that we should keep it “just in case.” Think before you print. Ask yourself if you really need it and what’s the worst that would happen if you didn’t have a copy of it.
• “Print” your documents to a PDF file. For documents that you want to keep a copy of, you can always save them to a PDF file. There are free or very cheap software solutions that allow you to select a PDF file instead of a printer when you print a document. I use Pdf995, but there are many other great solutions as well.
• Develop an organized folder structure on your computer. I have one folder called “Receipts, Invoices, and Confirmations” with subfolders by year. I have another folder called “My Pictures” with subfolders by year with more subfolders by month. However you set it up, make sure that you don’t have to think too much. If you do, then you will never use it.
• Use an automatic backup system. Do you backup your files? For years I told myself that I really need to backup my files. Luckily nothing ever happened, because my backups were few and far between. I wasn’t willing to take that risk any longer, so I began using a great automatic online backup service called Dropbox. Now my files are constantly backed up in the background without me even knowing about it. See my Products page to read more about how this great little service works. It’s free up to 2 GB of storage.
• Use a redundant backup system. For even more peace of mind, I use a second automatic backup system called Mozy. Mozy also offers 2 GB of free storage space. Mozy is the first online backup system that I have ever used. Like Dropbox, it backs up files in the background, but unfortunately Mozy isn’t nearly as user friendly when it comes to accessing files. Still, I use Mozy as second backup. It’s probably overkill, but the plan that I use is not terribly expensive, so I think it is worth it.
• Get credit monitoring. This is a service that I don’t have but intend to research more thoroughly. Dropbox and Mozy both encrypt your files as they are transmitted over the Internet, so they should be pretty safe. However, security breaches are always possible. Also, with more and more of our lives happening over the Internet in various ways, identity theft is becoming more of a danger.
• Ditch the physical photographs and go digital. These days most people have digital cameras. Film is dying a quick death. Still, many people get physical prints made from their digital photographs. Why? Programs like Google’s Picasa are making organizing, editing, and viewing photos a snap, and many of them are free.
• Scan your old photographs. Do you even look at your old physical photo albums? I know I don’t do it very often. I do look at my digital photographs though. It’s just so much easier. I have plenty of physical photographs that I have been meaning to scan. I finally decided that I will never do it. Now I plan on sending them to a service to have them scanned, even the ones that are currently in photo albums. Then I plan on giving the pictures away or tossing them. I can always have a print made from the digital scan if I really need to.
• Disconnect your printer from your computer. I haven’t done this yet, but I plan to. This will reduce my urge to print things. I am considering getting a very small printer for the rare occasions that I need to print something. I would just leave it in the closet. It has to be something very light and easy to hook up for a quick print job.
• Shred, shred, shred. If you have a lot of physical files, you can probably shred the vast majority of it. I used to keep credit card statements, bank statements, utility bills and all sorts of stuff. Now it is all going through the shredder. I honestly will never sit down and do it myself, so I’m collecting my old papers in a box to bring to a professional shredding service. I still have quite a few papers to go through. I have two file cabinets at home (one that is already empty), and I intend to get rid of both of them.
• Scan old physical documents that need to be kept. I have tax files and other documents that unfortunately really should be kept. I will need to scan these. How am I going to scan these documents? I really don’t know at this point. Will I do it myself? Is this something a professional service can do? Should I just find someone on Craigslist and pay them an hourly rate? I don’t know yet.

What other ideas do you have to make going digital more convenient, more secure, or more effective?

Do you study time management techniques? I have been studying them for about 20 years now, and I have found that, ironically, they are often a waste of time. Most of them are directed towards increasing our efficiency, but too often we are efficiently doing unimportant activities. Sometimes we have to remind ourselves that something not worth doing is not worth doing well.

This one of my biggest criticisms with David Allen’s cult classic time-management book Getting Things Done. There are some good ideas in the book, but his system has far too strong an emphasis on processing action items efficiently and almost no emphasis on determining whether the action items are worth doing in the first place.

The Overemphasis on Systems

Historically, one of the problems with time management systems is the focus on intricate systems for how to manage time. I’ve gone through numerous systems myself. They always sounded great. I would buy a new planner and set it up and try to implement the system. But it never really worked like I hoped. It always felt awkward, and in no time I would be completely ignoring the system. One reason that these systems never stuck was because the author of the system never focused on how to make using the system a habit. If you don’t condition the system as a new habit, it will fail every time.

The other aspect that turned me off about these systems is that I would be busier than ever but not feel like I was accomplishing anything important. And the reason was because I wasn’t! I really just found a way to be busier. I felt like I was on a hamster wheel. My results just didn’t seem to be justified by my activity level. My results may even have been an improvement over what I was getting previously, but it simply wasn’t worth it. I think it was because as you increase the number of activities that you fit into your schedule, you naturally work on tasks that are simply not as important.  Your output is low relative to your input.

Forget about Time Management. Focus on Focus.

My time management strategy is in some ways going in the complete opposite direction of the typical time management strategy. My goal isn’t to get more things done. It’s to get less things done! If I get less things done, then I’m probably on the right track. I now focus less on scheduling my time in detail and trying to squeeze the most out of every second, and I focus more on setting aside larger blocks of time to work on more important things.

My “planner” couldn’t be any simpler. It’s simply a Moleskine 3.5 in. X 5.5 in. 192 page ruled notebook without any dates or times printed on it.  I write the day and date at the top. On the top half of the page, I write down a few important tasks to complete for the day (usually 2-4). I use the bottom half of the page for notes to myself.

It’s extremely flexible and easy to use. It works for me. I still don’t complete all the tasks that I set for myself, but my success rate is improving. It’s a matter of raising my standards and changing my habits. The biggest change is that I’m not distracting myself with millions of little unimportant tasks.

What do you think? Do you think that you could benefit from a little more focus?

The concept of “lifestyle design” is a topic that has exploded in popularity over the last few years ever since Tim Ferriss coined the phrase in his book The 4-Hour Workweek. Some people (like myself) are passionate about the idea, and others think it is some kind of scam or just isn’t realistic. I’ve noticed that there is a lot of confusion about what it really means.

Lifestyle design is simply the process of arranging your life so that you can spend much less time doing things you don’t like and much more time doing things that excite you.

It’s not really about spending only 4 hours a week working, although you could do that if you wanted. You might even decide to spend far more than 4 hours a week “working.” The difference is that you would spend it “working” on something that you like to do. It wouldn’t really be “work” in the traditional sense if you loved to do it.

Some people criticize Ferriss as some kind of  fraud because he is a very hard working person, but they miss the point. He has designed his life so that he can“work” at whatever he wants. Sometimes it will be a business venture. Sometimes it is a fighting competition. Sometimes it’s learning a new language. He has the freedom to do all of these things that excite him.

Ferriss has explained in interviews that the 4 hours is an arbitrary number. The real point is to radically reduce the number of hours you spend doing things you would rather not do. This idea is a revolutionary departure from what Ferriss calls the “deferred life plan” in which we look forward to retirement many years down the road so that we will finally have the time to do what we want. When you think about it, how much sense does it make to waste the years of our life when we have the greatest physical vitality?

There must be a way to create more time to explore things that really excite us while we are still young, and this is what the lifestyle design movement is all about. It is about very consciously and very deliberately creating the ability to live our lives the way we want. That’s why I started this website, and that’s what I have set out to do. There certainly are no guarantees that I will be successful, but it will be an interesting experiment nonetheless.

My Four Areas of Focus

In order to put lifestyle design into action in my own life, I have decided on four areas to focus on:

1. Location and time independence. This means that I’m not tied down to any single location, and I can determine my own schedule. In order to do this, I will need to earn income without working for others. Initially I plan to earn income using the Internet, which is the ultimate location and time independence tool. Eventually, I hope to have enough passive income from investments where even this will be unnecessary.
2. Health and fitness. Improving my physical conditioning will contribute significantly to living the life that I want. It is difficult to be active and happy when you are tired, ill, or weak. I’ve noticed that the way I feel physically makes all the difference in the world to how I feel mentally. And vice versa.
3. Minimalism. I never use the vast majority of my possessions. They just take up space and collect dust. Whenever I see a minimalist home, I always find it very attractive. I like simplicity and space. Minimalism makes it easier to move, makes it easier to clean your home, requires less storage space, and saves you money (since you are buying much less stuff). It could also contribute to location independence if I decided to put everything in storage and live abroad for a while.
4. Find a girlfriend. I want to find someone who has similar values to explore life with. I’m almost 41 years old now. I want to settle down without necessarily settling down. By this I mean I want to find a woman who doesn’t necessarily want to lock themselves into one location and live a static life (although a static “home base” is a possibility). I want to try new things and find some adventure, so I want to find someone who shares that desire. Will I find someone like that who I really connect with? Who knows?

These are the main areas I’m focusing on. I haven’t been spending nearly as much time making this a reality as I would like. Old habits die hard, and life happens. Right now it’s difficult because my day job as an accountant requires working overtime during the busy season. However, this really isn’t a good excuse. As I mentioned in my post Blogging as a Personal Development Tool, one reason that I’m blogging about this is to hold myself accountable.

Now that I have thrown this out there for the whole world to see, I have to start putting it into action more consistently.

It’s go time!

This Week’s Posts

02/22/10 – Today is the Most Important Day of Your Life!
02/23/10 – Make Today a Great Day
02/24/10 – Four Simple Questions That Can Change Your Life
02/25/10 – What Does It Mean to Live a Balanced Life?

From around the Web

Steve Scott – 29 Ways to Make Today the Worst Day Ever
The Blog of Steve Schwartz – No One Knows What the F*** They’re Doing (or “The 3 Types of Knowledge”)
Zen Habits – Email Sanity: How to Clear Your Inbox When You’re Drowning
Walk Talk Chew Gum – Life. It’s all about your perspective.

There are no shortage of articles or blog posts about the importance of achieving balance in your life. It’s pretty much taken as a given. But what does it really mean to live a “balanced” life?

The way most people describe balance, life is like a teeter-totter. If you ever played on a teeter-totter when you were a kid, you probably remember that it wasn’t very enjoyable unless the other kid was about the same weight. While this is easy to understand, I don’t think this is a very good metaphor for life balance.

The teeter-totter is an example of a lever in which each end is equidistant from the fulcrum, or pivot point. This type of lever will balance only when the weights are equal. However, a lever can also be in balance with unequal weights by moving the pivot point closer to the heavier weight. This is a much more accurate metaphor. We don’t need to try to equalize the important areas of our life to achieve balance in our lives.

“Balance” is not the same for different people or at different times.

When most people talk about balance, they talk as if there is one point of balance that is right and that doesn’t change. Nothing could be further from the truth. For example, Warren Buffett lives an unbalanced life from the perspective of most people. He devotes an extraordinary amount of time to business — analyzing businesses, thinking about business, and investing. Some would even consider him obsessed. It might seem unbalanced, but it works for him. He loves his work, enjoys his life, and is not stressed out. Isn’t this what you would expect from a “balanced” life?

“Balance” will change throughout your life. If you are a new mother, balance will be different than if you are trying to build a career. As you get older, you will probably shift your balance away from activities requiring significant physical exertion. The point is that balance will be different for everyone. The right balance will depend on your values and your current situation.

Is your life out of balance?

If you feel that something just isn’t right about your life, maybe your brain is trying to tell you that you are out of balance. Are you stressed out? Are you tired all the time? Are you unhappy? These are all signs that your life might be out of balance.

Maybe what you need to do to regain your balance is to become a little more “unbalanced.” By this I mean that you might need to focus less on certain areas in order to temporarily focus on the areas of your life that require additional attention.

In what ways do you need to change your focus in order to regain your balance?