PRINCIPLES OF A GOOD LIFE
A Balanced Life
According to psychologist Sidney
Jourard, fully 85 percent of your happiness in life
will come from your personal
relationships. Your interactions and the time that you
spend with the people you care about
will be the major source of the pleasure,
enjoyment and satisfaction that you
derive daily. The other 15 percent of your
happiness will come from your
accomplishments. Unfortunately, many people lose sight
of what is truly important, and they
allow the tail to wag the dog. They sacrifice their
relationships, their major source of
happiness, to accomplish more in their careers. But
one’s career, at best, can be only a
minor source and a temporary one, at that of the
happiness and satisfaction that
everyone wants.
There is no perfect answer to the key
question of how to achieve balance in our lives,
but there are a number of ideas that
can help you to be and have and do more in the
areas that are important to you. These
ideas often require changes and modifications in
the way you think and use your time,
but the price is well worth it. You will find that by
reorganizing your life in little ways,
you can create an existence that gives you the
highest quality and quantity of
satisfaction overall. And this must be your guiding
purpose.
The ancient Greeks had two famous
sayings: “Man, know thyself” and “Moderation in
all things.” Taken together, those two
ideas are a good starting point for achieving the
balance that you desire. With regard
to knowing thyself, it is very important to give
some serious thought to what you
really value in life. All trade-offs and choices are
based on your values, and all stress
and unhappiness come from believing and valuing
one thing and, yet, finding yourself
doing another. Only when your values and your
activities are congruent do you feel
happy and at peace with yourself.
So knowing yourself means knowing what
you really value, knowing what is really
important to you. The superior man or
woman decides what is right before he or she
decides what is possible. The advanced
human being organizes his or her life to assure
that everything that he or she is
doing is consistent with his or her true values. It is
essential for you to organize your
life around yourself, rather than to organize yourself
around the demands of your external
world.
The second quote, “Moderation in all
things,” is a wonderful and important dictate for
successful living. But, at the same
time, you know that you can’t really be successful in
any area by being moderate in that
area. Peter Drucker once wrote, “Wherever you find
something getting done, you find a
monomaniac with a mission.” You know that singleminded
concentration on a goal or objective
is absolutely necessary for achievement of
any kind in a competitive society.
So what’s the solution? Over the
years, I have worked with tens of thousands of men
and women who have spent a lot of time
and effort struggling to achieve balance in
their lives. I have found that there
is a simple formula; it is simple in that it is easy to
explain, but you need tremendous
self-discipline and persistence to implement it in
your life.
The formula revolves around a concept
of time management, or what you might
want to call life management. Time
management is really a form of personal
management in which you organize your
24 hours a day in such a way that they give
you the greatest possible return of
happiness and contentment.
The key to time management, after you
have determined your values and the goals
that are in harmony with those values,
is to set both priorities and posteriorities. The
importance of setting priorities is
obvious. You make a list of all the things that you can
possibly do and then select from that
list the things that are most important to you
based on everything you know about
yourself, about others and about your
responsibilities. The setting of
posteriorities is often overlooked. It is when you carefully
decide which things you are going to
stop doing so that you will have enough time to
start doing something else.
The greatest single shortage we
experience in America today is that of time. We
suffer from what has been called “time
poverty.” Men and women everywhere feel that
their biggest single challenge is that
they simply do not have enough time to do all the
things that they have to do or want to
do. People today feel pressured from all sides
and are under an inordinate amount of
stress. They feel overworked, fatigued and
incapable of fulfilling all the
responsibilities that they have taken on.
The starting point to alleviate this
time poverty is to stop and think. Most people are
so busy rushing back and forth that
they seldom take the time to think seriously about
who they are and why they are doing
what they are doing. They engage in frantic
activity, instead of thoughtful
analysis. They get so busy climbing the ladder of success
that they lose sight of the fact that
the ladder may be leaning against the wrong
building.
When my wife, Barbara, and I started
our family, we were faced with a common
dilemma: how can we balance the
demands of work and home with the finite amount
of time we are all given?
Here’s the answer I discovered: The
key to success in a busy society is to devote
your time to only two areas during the
period of time when your family needs you,
when your children are between the
ages of birth to about 18 to 20 years. During this
period of time, you need to curtail
virtually all of your outside activities. You need to
focus on two major areasyour family and your careeras I have done over the years.
You need to place your family’s needs
above all else and then organize your work
schedule so that you can satisfy those
needs on a regular basis. Then, when you work,
you must concentrate single-mindedly
on doing an excellent job.
Most people are time wasters. They
waste their own time, and they waste your time
as well. To be successful and happy,
you must discipline yourself to work all the time
you work. The average employee works
at about 50 percent of capacity. Fully 80
percent of people working today are
underemployed in that their jobs do not really
demand their full capacities. Only 5
percent of workers surveyed recently felt that they
were working at the outside limits of
their potentials.
But this is not for you. You must
resolve to work all the time you work. You must
decide that from the time you start in
the morning until the time you finish in the
evening, you will work 100 percent of
the time. Even if no one is watching you, you
should be aware that everyone is
watching you. Everybody knows everything. In
every company, everyone knows who is
working and who is not. Your job must be to
work all the time you work. If people
come by and want to chat, you simply smile at
them and say, “Could we talk about
this later?” Tell them that you have to get back to
work.
Have a written list, and work on your
list every day. Write down everything as it
comes up, and add it to your list. Set
priorities on your time, and be certain that you
are working on the things that are
most important to your boss and to your company.
Refuse to get drawn into the
time-wasting activities of the people around you. Work all
the time you work.
Remember that to be successful, you
must become a monomaniac with a mission.
This is true today, and it has always
been true in our competitive society. To be
successful at your job, you must work
fast and efficiently and nonstop all the time you
are on the payroll. You must become an
expert at time management. You must
become so efficient and effective that
you get twice as much done as anyone else. In
this way, you will advance your career
at the fastest rate possible, and you will also be
on top of your job most of the time,
and it will be unnecessary for you to take work
home for the evenings and weekends.
Then, when you have finished your
work, you can devote your full attention to your
family and to the other important
people in your life. The Bible says, “A double-minded
man is unstable in all his ways.” One
of the meanings of this is that if you are thinking
about your work while you are with
your family, or if you are thinking about your family
when you are at work, you end up
accomplishing far less in each area. However, if you
are on top of your work, when you come
home you can devote yourself singlemindedly
again, like a monomaniac to your relationships and to enhancing
the
quality of your interactions with the
most important people in your life.
The key to a happy family life is
communication. And it is not quality of time but
quantity of time that counts. Quality
moments those little moments that are precious
and important come unbidden and, usually, unexpectedly. They arise during the
process of spending a large quantity
of uninterrupted time with one or more people.
You cannot dictate those moments in
advance. You cannot decide to have quality time.
You do not go to it. It comes to you.
There are a variety of ways to extract
the greatest amount of quality and happiness
from your relationships with the
members of your family. Perhaps the most important
is to spend unbroken time with your
spouse on a daily basis. Of course, you should
spend time together talking after the
children have gone to bed, but you should also
seek out and utilize small segments of
time during the morning and early evening
during which you can communicate and interact.
One of the most important things that
couples can do is spend the first 30
to 60 minutes after work debriefing each other and
discussing the day’s activities.
Your children also have a tremendous
need to communicate with you. In fact, in my
research on how to raise super kids, I
found that the one factor that was more
important than any other was the
amount of one-on-one time that the parents spent
with the children. When parents don’t
spend a lot of time with their children
individually, they send a message to
their children that they are not very valuable or
important. Children then react by
experiencing feelings of inferiority, lowered selfesteem,
and negative self-images, and this is
expressed in poor grades and behavioral
problems. But when the parents take
the time to sit down with their children and ask
questions and listen to what is going
on in their minds, the children tend to feel a deep
sense of value and importance that is
manifested in self-confidence, happiness, and
good relationships with others.
The key is learning to use your time
better. You cannot get more hours out of each
day, but you can put more of yourself
into each of those hours. Turn off the television
and spend time talking with the
members of your family. Never read newspaper of
books when a member of your family
wants to communicate with you. Put the reading
material aside. Concentrate
single-mindedly on the most important people in your
world. Everything else can wait.
In regard to your work and family,
continually ask yourself, “What is the most
valuable use of my time right now?”
Consider if what you are doing today will matter a
week or a year from today. Sometimes,
we become preoccupied with small things that
are not really important in the long
run. But what is important in the long run is the
quality of our home life.
You don’t have to be a superman or
superwoman to properly balance the demands of
your work and the needs of your
family. You must, however, be more thoughtful, be a
better planner, use your time more
effectively, and continually think of ways to
enhance the quality of your life in
both areas. If you set this as a goal and resolve to
work toward it every day, you will
gradually become far more efficient, far more
effective, and a far happier human being. And that’s
the most important thing of all.
written by brain Tracy
