Seasons of Life
Progress is built through sustained attention and determination.
I recently came across a Twitter post that argued that you can’t have it all. Instead, if you want to accomplish great things in life, you have to embrace the seasonality of life. There are seasons for work, for health, for family, for friends, etc.
Instead of trying to have it all at once, acknowledge that some seasons will be more focused on one thing than others.
To an extent, I think this idea is right. It’s unreasonable to expect that you can do it all perfectly at all times. However, I also think this doesn’t quite get at the nuances of how progress is created.
Progress is built through sustained attention and determination. When you go all-in on one thing, you’ll surely make a lot of progress on it. But it’s not that the other things are simply waiting for you to pick up when you come back to them. Instead, they deteriorate, fall apart, and can even disappear.
Take your health, for example. Do you think you’ll be healthier if you spend 10 years working out an hour a day and eating largely healthily? Or will you be healthier if you spend 5 years throwing exercise and nutrition to the wayside and then making it the focal point of your life for the next 5? My intuition and experience point to the first.
Here’s the thesis: the many parts of your life that you tend to often become easier the more you engage with them. It’s a whole lot easier to eat healthy when you’ve been doing it for a while. It’s easier to deepen your relationships when you’ve taken a little time each week to keep them going. It’s easier to push on work when an opportunity arises when you’ve been steadily building the skills to take advantage of it.
Seasons of life
one category expands / total capacity contracts
Balanced life
all categories expand / total capacity expands
Moreover, I think there are remarkable synergies that arise between these different areas of life. When you’re healthy, you’re often better at work. When your work is going well, you’re able to develop stronger relationships without the clouds of anxiety that come with a lack of stability.