Balance.
I hate it.
Nothing frustrates me like balance and the never-ending pursuit of it.
The examples are endless:
How to be healthy?
Workout and eat well, but also give yourself days to rest and eat cheat meals.
Balance.
Want to sustain meaningful relationships?
Spend time with people you love and communicate openly, but also take time to be alone and work on yourself.
Balance.
Want to be more charitable, funnier, happier, more efficient, or whatever else?
The answer is - you guessed it — balance.
Don’t over indulge. Everything in moderation.
Not too hot, not too cold, just right.
The same frustrating principle applies to motivation.
Some days we’re ready to run across the country to accomplish our goals and other days we can’t be bothered to get off the couch.
How do we find the balance between tunnel-visioned focus and directionless navel-gazing?
Or what about love? I’d say it applies here too.
Some days love is easy. The jokes are landing, the memories are rosy, and the communication channels are open.
But other days it can feel like your significant other is suddenly a distant stranger.
So we can all agree that this sucks.
We are forced to spend our time carefully adjusting the scales, trying to find that elusive “balance,” and then, if by some miracle we find it, we fight tooth and nail to stand perfectly still, or else lose that precious equilibrium.
But, of course, we always do.
We lose motivation, we eat that extra dessert, we say that cruel thing.
And so that equilibrium is lost, and we fall, once again, out of balance.
But maybe we have been looking at it all wrong. Maybe this idea of “balance” is a bunch of crap.
A long time ago I listened to a podcast I don’t remember the name of, and the guest was Chris Burkard. He is an Uber-talented surf photographer well worth checking out.
Anyway, he had a philosophy about balance that I loved, and this is my half-remembered version of it:
Life is not about finding balance, because balance doesn’t exist. The true goal is learning to flatten the wave.
What wave?
Well, he says that life is less like a scale and more like a wave, constantly swelling and dipping—ebbing and flowing.
It’s as unpredictable and constant as nature itself.
Some days we are going to be more motivated than others, some days we will be kinder than others. That’s just the way it is.
So forget about carefully adjusting weights on some imaginary scale until you find “balance,” because you’re on the open ocean and the waves are tossing us from side to side and there’s no way that’s gonna work.
So instead, figure out how to ride those waves.
Learn how to anticipate the ebbs and capitalize on the flows.
When you slip into a bad habit, don’t be surprised, be prepared.
People can’t be perfect, but we can be smart.
So learn how to ride that low period out, knowing that a new flow state is coming soon.
And eventually we could even learn how to “flatten the wave.”
What does that mean?
Imagine it on a 10 point scale.
10 is you at your best, 1 is you at your worst.
If you are launching to a 9 then plummeting to a 2, there’s some work to be done.
But if you can flatten out that wave until you glide gracefully between 4-6 or even better 5-7, you’re onto something good.
Now, how we accomplish is a harder question to answer.
How does one go about flattening the wave, or even learning to ride it?
Something to dive into another time, but for now I am happy knowing I’m not a failure for never being able to find perfect balance in any aspect of my life.
We’re all just people going through ebbs and flows, every day, in a thousand different ways.
And that’s okay.