There are no miracles. There is only discipline
And then there is new year resolution..
If you have written 179 books, been on Guinness book of world records - would you take a chill pill and enjoy your time?
Danielle Steele - the author of 179 books still works 20 hours a day.
I keep working.
The more you shy away from the material, the worse it gets. You're better off pushing through and ending up with 30 dead pages you can correct later than just sitting there with nothing," she advises. Her output is also the result of a near superhuman ability to run on little sleep. "I don't get to bed until I'm so tired I could sleep on the floor. If I have four hours, it's really a good night for me," Steel says
Coming back to the work-life balance debate, I believe the biggest mistake in this entire conversation is when one’s work and life are totally different. For e.g. X is a banker and X also plays guitar during the weekends.
X is going to get frustrated very soon as he/she moves up the corp ladder and finds it difficult to get the work-life balance.
X has to find work-life harmony. After all, work-life balance is too important to be left to one’s boss/employer or investor.
Nigel Marsh, author of Fat, Forty and Fired has a very interesting take on work-life balance.
With the smallest investment in the right places, you can radically transform the quality of your relationships and the quality of your life. Moreover, I think, it can transform society. Because if enough people do it, we can change society's definition of success away from the moronically simplistic notion that the person with the most money when he dies wins, to a more thoughtful and balanced definition of what a life well lived looks like.
Your New Year Resolution?
One of the important points which Nigel mentions in his talk is of small investments in the right places. You don’t need to change things ‘suddenly’, but 1% change over a period of time has a much bigger compounding effect than a big change-and-going-back-to-square-eventually.
1% improvement? If you have started gym, add 1% to it every day (weight training/cardio - what’er you want to focus on).
There are after all, no miracles. Just discipline. So just do it. 1% improvement every day!
-Ashish Sinha.
PS: This is the weekend edition of the newsletter, focused on bringing some thought perspectives to you. If you have any feedback, please do share (hit the reply button). And like always, hit heart icon if you like it.