Chapter 8: Movement is Balance
“How you climb the mountain is more important than reaching the top.” – Yvon Chouinard
While the ownership of our time is Time Wealth, and time rich is the extraction of value from our time, we can’t lose focus on the underlying theme of it all: balance.
Just like the law of diminishing returns to the happiness – or value – we receive from an increasing number of cars, there’s a law of diminishing returns to the aspects of life we love the most (especially if you love cars ). Even your passion, if pursued without a focus on a balanced life, will diminish in the amount of value it returns.
When building true Time Wealth, it goes beyond the full ownership of your time. Becoming fully time rich means that you have to actively do something with the time you own, so you gain the most value from each second, minute, hour, and day.
If you spend too much time on one area of your life, it’s easy to become burned out. You lose focus on that area, it diminishes in value, and you end up wasting your time chasing something you don’t want to achieve anymore.
Think of it in terms of your projects:
Your base project might provide you with the most overall value per minute. You gain the most money from the time you invest, and you also gain the most overall happiness.
Let’s say, however, that there’s a diminishing return to the hours you put in after 4pm. It’s just hard to focus or get excited about your work after you’ve used all your creative energy throughout the day. Probably describes a lot of us, right?
If your projects – including the “projects” in your personal life (i.e., network, friends, lovers, entertainment, reading, etc.) – were mutually exclusive, you’d continue to put in hours at work, knowing that overall, you’d be extracting the most value. But your life isn’t made up of mutually exclusive projects!
Your life is made up of interconnected parts that work together to yield you the greatest value.
Using simple math, give each of your interests, projects, and parts of your life a unit of value. Your base project gives you the most value overall when compared to other parts of your life, at five units of value a day.
But what if grabbing a drink with a close friend gave you two units of value? What if going to a concert yielded three units of value. If everything were mutually exclusive, you’d still decide to work. But since nothing in life is mutually exclusive, you should allocate your time appropriately to live the most fun and fulfilling life.
You could, if you truly owned your own time, stop working at 3pm, and receive three out of the five units of value from your work. Using that extra time, you could head across town for a concert, adding an additional three units of value to your life. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that this strategy would yield you six units of value, while working the entire day would only yield five.
Throw in a drink, and you just maximized your time by giving yourself the most overall value possible. That, my friend, is Time Wealth – maximizing the time that you own. Which goes back to the project path you built through a collection of work projects. If you built your project path in such a way that it gives you the ability to spend your time how you choose, it’s much easier to maximize your time through balanced activities, rather, let’s say, than working a traditional 9-5 with an overbearing boss.
Part Your Life
Essentially, your life is made up of many “parts,” which include all aspects of your life, even your work projects.
Depending on who you are, your life can be comprised of various parts: relationships, friendships, work projects, recreation, travel, etc. It’s the summation of these parts that is literally your life. How you balance each one of these parts forms the shape of your life.
Think of a “part” of your life as anything you do consistently. If you divide up the 24 hours in a typical day into categories (yes, even sleep), you’ll identify the parts of your life. Some people have a few parts, some people have many, but regardless of the amount, the key is balance.
With this in mind, we need to take our Time Wealth and ensure that we’re allocating our time strategically among each part of our life, so that we extract the most overall value from it.
Being a self-proclaimed space nerd, I picture life like a solar system. “Life,” as we have come to know it, is at the center of your solar system, like the Sun. Each part of your life, whether it’s work or play, orbits your center like a planet.
Some parts, like family or work, orbit closer to your center and have a stronger gravitational pull. Other parts, like exercise, which are still important, but not supremely so, orbit your emotional center farther away. These parts, although having a weaker pull, do their part to keep your entire life centered and balanced.
By pushing and pulling on your center, it’s the symbiotic orbit of all of your life’s parts that keeps you in proper alignment. It’s balancing your life, through the allocation of your time, so you extract the most overall value, that is Time Wealth.
In the same vein, if any one of your life’s parts, even the less important ones, pushes or pulls on your center more or less than it should, it throws your life out of alignment.
Therefore, it’s important to identify the parts of your life, and understand how they interact with each other so you can place the proper amount of focus on each one.
Oftentimes, when I’m feeling unmotivated, it’s because I’m not trying to actively expand my mind. When this happens, I know I’ve lost focus on the “learning” part of my life. Understanding this, I reallocate my time from more mundane activities, like lounging in front of the TV, and spend more intentional time reading.
Once I start to read more, I feel my motivation increasing and my life moving back toward center. Through the symbiotic relationship of my life’s parts, the increased focus on my reading starts a domino effect that further pulls my life back into alignment.
Reading more increases the number of concepts I know, which makes me want to share those concepts with others. Through the discussion of interesting concepts and topics, I’m able to strengthen the “networking” part of my life.
It becomes entirely possible, then, that the increased strength of my network results in a business deal that helps my work projects. The new business deal could increase my confidence through a validation of my work, reduce my work time through a large client that can sustain me long-term, and grant me even more Time Wealth.
Which, if I focus on balance, gives me the opportunity to allocate more time to the things that will increase the value of my life.
It’s clear that Time Wealth used to achieve a balanced life is important, but how do we achieve proper alignment? The secret is that there’s no “proper” alignment. A balanced life will have a different meaning for everyone.
It’s possible, however, to get closer and closer to true center by:
1. Identifying your life’s parts
2. Tracking the amount of time you spend on each part
3. Valuing each part in relation to the importance it has on your life
4. Comparing the time you spend against the value you place on each part
5. Adjusting your time and focus so they align with the order of your values
6. Rinsing, repeating
Balance and Counterbalance
While life is about balance, as with everything, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. With this in mind, sometimes, to achieve true balance, it’s a matter of finding your counterbalance.
Sometimes the key to finding your true center is to have a balance – i.e., a passion – skewed one way, and have a counterbalance that’s equally skewed the opposite direction:
Using the space analogy, it’s the same as having two parts of your life pulling in opposite directions of each other, keeping your life centered. If you know that one part of your life is going to have an incredibly strong pull, you can strategically place a counterpoint in your life:
If you self-identify as a worker bee, for example, it’s incredibly important that you place a focus on rest and relaxation, so you’re always fresh. Even if more focus is placed on your work projects, having even the smallest focus on relaxation will slowly pull your life into alignment, like the turning of a cruise ship.
This way, you can stay hyper-motivated and goal-oriented, without giving up your zest for life and the “why” behind your motivation.
Be strategic in how you spend your Time Wealth. Only through a balanced life that maximizes personal value will you become time rich.