Ginni Saraswati is the founder and CEO of Ginni Media, cofounder of The Podcast Accelerator and host of The Ginni Show.
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Work and life shouldn’t feel like a balancing act.
The concept of “work-life balance” began floating around in the corporate ether as far back as the 1980s. The Women’s Liberation Movement brought the necessity of workplace flexibility to the forefront, and today, there are few people of working age who haven’t heard the term. It’s a favorite value companies love to tout in interviews but, sadly, this “balance” often still feels aspirational.
Work is everywhere. We can barely make out the lock-screen image on our phones because task reminders and email summaries bombard our smartphones. These notifications regularly cover up the faces of our kids, cats and significant others. These images are meant to remind us of what’s important, and yet, we often miss the glaringly obvious point.
This constant connection is like an umbilical cord linking us to a life source. Work is money, and we need money to survive. So, we normalize throwing ourselves into it 110%. We’ve popularized hustle culture and hero-worshiping the most hardworking among us has become the name of the game. The mantra sounds something like Elon Musk’s famous tweet proclaiming, “...nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.”
Meanwhile, a book published in 2018 found workplace stress to be the fifth biggest cause of death among Americans. When it isn’t fatal, stress can lead to burnout. It’s important for leaders to understand that burnout isn’t conducive to good work.
On his podcast On Purpose, Jay Shetty shares that 47% of people who consider themselves “burnt out” are aware they’re producing lower-quality work than when they’re feeling rested. He surmises, “What we realize is that the brain's just not good at dealing with a lot of things, right?” Right.
The truth is that for many entrepreneurs, our work is a huge part of our identity. The constant presence of our rectangular appendages in this highly connected world is just a part of the job. That also means that going offline to fully immerse yourself in a family vacation, or even an hour-long massage, can come with a certain level of trepidation.
Even if you despise hustle culture, there’s also something about the whole “work-life balance” trope that seems clichè. It assumes a disconnect between personal and professional that can spur its own identity crisis. Constantly having to decide which version of yourself to switch on and off all the time creates even more stress. It’s clear this isn’t really working for anyone.
So, how do we fix what’s broken about the work-life balance platitude?
Perhaps the answer to the riddle is harmony. Picture yourself standing at the exact center of an old, brass balance scale. That mid-point is called the fulcrum and that’s your center of gravity. When the bowls at each side of the scale are at equal levels, you’re considered balanced.
The problem is that staying balanced requires that you not move too much to either side, lest the balance tip in favor of one over the other. So, you end up occupying the fulcrum at all times, tilting a little to the right, then a little to the left, and so on. Work-life balance is about making things appear equal at all times. But anyone with a business and a family or a sick child or an aging parent can tell you that sometimes, you need to walk away from the fulcrum.
Serial entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk has often been challenged about his seemingly constant level of professional output. People assume he must exist in a constant state of work-life imbalance, yet he claims to take seven weeks of vacation every year where he’s “all in.” In interviews, he also advises, “I would go with whatever feels best at that moment... You feel like you want to take a vacation, take it. If you don’t, don’t.”
Always unapologetically himself, he suggests that too many people keep up with what they “think” work-life balance looks like instead of really listening to themselves. Maybe he’s got this whole harmony thing figured out. And he’s not the only one. Other examples include YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki who dines at home with her family every night and Mark Zuckerberg who took 2 months of paternity leave. We default to calling this work-life balance, but to me, it looks a lot more like harmony and more to the point, a harmony built on awareness of what works for you and your values.
Tip the scale toward what really needs to be prioritized.
Harmony is the fine art of combining all of the elements you love, like family, business, hobbies and interests, and finding ways for them to complement each other. It’s about incorporating the work you love into the life you have to create the life you want.
What’s happening in our professional lives and our personal lives is ever-evolving. As our needs, ambitions, desires and life circumstances change, we must learn to tip the balance toward what needs to be prioritized.
I do think rest is important and I also believe that if you have large ambitions, resting won't achieve them. I do think hard work is important and also believe that burnout and not spending time with those you love can ultimately land you in a miserable place. Like Vaynerchuk says, I think the most important part is being “all in,” wherever you are in that moment.
Fostering a more synergistic lifestyle can help bridge the gap between your ambitions and your well-being. If we can learn to stop compartmentalizing ourselves and apply this philosophy of wholeness and focus on being present, then I believe that’s where we’ll find harmony, meaning and more than just the “pursuit” of happiness.
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