Go real fast!

There’s a lot of talk about “balance” and “boundaries” and all sorts of phrases like that. I’m always interested when I hear this in Christian circles because the men and women of the New Testament were incredibly out of balance and the very reason Christianity spread was because it refused to have boundaries.

But I digress. Back to the present-day.

Just an observation. Two kinds of people seem to talk about work-life balance.

  1. People who are already financially successful. There’s something about a person with passive income from their investments and ideas that makes them a bit preachy about work-life balance to people who aren’t quite in their tax bracket.
  2. People who have legit 9-5 jobs. OK, I admit it, I’m jealous of you. I gave up my 9-5 gig in 2002 and small parts of me have regretted it. (Like the parts of me that got the direct deposit and did countdowns until I got 4 weeks vacation instead of 3.) But yeah, if you have a job that you can completely contain into your work day, awesome.

That leaves a whole lot of schmucks just like me. People on the pathway to achieving some measure of success in the work they are passionate about.

So here’s what I’m learning when it comes to work-life balance. And here’s the obstacle that I’m learning to overcome.

The work-life balance people above? They don’t know what they are talking about. 

When life is going way too fast, when you have too much on your plate, and when your instinct and those work-life voices are screaming in your ear about balance?

Give them a wink and hit the gas real hard.

Seriously.

It’s your instinct to slow down that is killing you. That’s what is keeping it a one-man show or a 10 person shop when it can become a whole lot bigger than you. You’ve got to go a lot faster than what you think you can handle in order to really start to grow.

To grow you have to get past the current capacity you have and define a whole new capacity.

And you won’t discover that new capacity for that organization until you go real fast!

Photo credit: Mario Pleitez via Flickr (Creative Commons)

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One response to “Go real fast!”

  1. Matt Cleaver Avatar

    I was in a Q&A with the President of Luther Seminary and someone asked him about achieving balance. He replied that he thought balance was impossible, you are always swinging and adjusting on the fly, but he did believe in being centered. I liked that.

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