What’s your ultimate goal in life? To be successful and affluent? To be happy? To achieve a unique identity in society? Self-actualisation? Give back something to society? Or to follow the Hedonists and seek only pleasure?
Your answer to this question might be along the lines of, “Probably all these, though that’s quite impossible.” My purpose here is to share with you a single formula that, I believe, can help a person realise all the above goals and more.
The success formula
Let’s begin with the most popular life goal — success. One way to learn is to study the lives and habits of successful people. Albert Einstein, for example, worked on the ideas that flashed in his mind at all times, day and night.
Melody queen Lata Mangeshkar would practise for hours as a teenager, and she has continued to enjoy her mammoth practice sessions every single day of her life. Sachin Tendulkar, even as a school kid, loved batting practice, hitting balls against a wall well past midnight.
Think of Zakir Hussain, Bismillah Khan, Michael Jackson, or an Olympic winner of your choice. All of them have one thing in common: they never had ‘working hours’. And that’s because they enjoyed their work so much that no other activity was as much ‘fun’. They never knew or needed to practise ‘work-life balance’.
Advocates of work-life balance recommend that after work hours, we go to some club or park for recreation, but these people derived more pleasure in their ‘work’. So, they have had more ‘fun hours’ (read ‘work hours’) than most of us have work-plus-fun hours.
Why are we not so involved in our work? Imagine what would’ve happened if Tendulkar had become a chartered accountant, or if Bismillah was forced to study engineering.
Well, that’s what’s happening with most of us. We fail to see a ‘fit’ between something within us and what the career or profession demands.
The greater the scope in your work to satisfy basic drives, the greater will be your involvement in fulfilling them.
In common parlance we call it ‘passion’. People whose needs aren’t adequately satisfied at work, function just to meet their survival needs. To fulfill their core-driving forces, they look for recreational activities suggested by work-life enthusiasts.
The names mentioned above could convey the misleading impression that we’re talking of geniuses. But in today’s highly-competitive world, excellence in work is mandatory.
We find thousands of young architects, doctors, fashion designers, and managers who’ve made it to the pinnacle of their profession while in their 30s and 40s. They were successfulbecause of their commitment and passion, not because they practised work-life balance.
Should we slow down the march of civilisation, the benefits of which we are reaping — thanks to inventors like Thomas Alva Edison, who famously said it was 99% perspiration — by asking these geniuses to work limited hours?
Secondly, if all of us were to adopt this work-life balance model, and ‘worked’ for more or less the same hours and spent some hours with friends, family, and in recreation, we would all end up as ‘standardised’ products from a factory, made using the same mould! But isn’t our world a wonderful place because of diverse people?
Other blessings
I had said that I’d offer one formula to achieve all different life goals. We discussed success. But what about happiness?
Well, success and happiness go together. Is happiness different from doing something that’s fun, gives you joy, and satisfies your needs?
What about someone who wants to give something back to society? You can only give what you have in abundance, and in the field in which you are a master — to give, you must first achieve a lot.
And, finally, what about individuals whose ultimate aspiration is to achieve a unique identity in society, what you may call ‘self-actualisation’ or personal fulfillment? Carrying forward our logic, a unique identity is attained through social recognition, which comes from making an extraordinary contribution to one’s field.
Personal fulfillment is the outcome of attaining success, happiness and a unique social identity. Such a full realisation of potential is possible only when a person is driven by his own individual passion.
To sum up, the concept of work-life balance is seriously flawed. Selecting a career or profession that exploits or gratifies one’s unique driving forces is a far better route to success, happiness, personal fulfilment and a distinct identity in society than trying to follow some flawed notion of work-life balance.
Having a passion gives life a purpose. Many research findings have now proved that those who live with a purpose live longer (and healthier) than those living without a clear purpose or passion. So identity your passion and pursue it to live long and be happy.
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