Creating Lasting, Meaningful Change

By John R. Nocero & Terri Christensen

All meaningful and lasting change starts on the inside and works its way out." -Lou Tice, co-founder of the Pacific Institute

 Life is a series of trade offs. Want to get up early to workout? Then you have to go to sleep early, so you are rested. Do you want to stay up late to watch a Netflix marathon of Ozark? Then you are going to be tired, and you won't perform well. Are you willing to accept these consequences? You have to answer that.

You really can have it all, but only if you are willing to get extremely specific with what you want and then pursue it with reckless abandon. James Clear has a theory – he calls it the Four Burners. The central question he explores through his work is how we can live better, finding great ideas, and make them actionable and put in practice in daily life.

The Four Burners

According to Clear, imagine that a stove represents your life with four burners on it. Each burner symbolizes one major quadrant of your life. The first burner is your family; the second is your friends, the third, your health, and the fourth burner is your work.

Here is how the theory works. It says that "to be successful, you have to cut off one of your burners. And to be successful, you have to cut off two. Now, your initial reaction may be astonishment; this is not possible. Or maybe you want to combine two. For example, you want to focus on exercise and work. You sit in front of a computer all day, so you decide that you are getting a standing desk. You know sitting is unhealthy. So now you are standing and working for 8 hours or more. Let's stop here, so you realize that you are not healthy. This new desk is not focused exercise. You are just standing. And it is going to be even harder for you to adapt to because you are not used to standing 8 hours a day over five days in your workweek. That's 40 hours of standing. So then you sit some more, and then some more. And then before you know it, you are sitting 100% of the time. All work, no exercise again.

Here is the issue – you probably are looking for some sort of workaround because this is the hardest lesson because you have to face the real problem – you have to choose. For many of us, work is #1. It is where we spend most of our time, our effort, and where we get our identity. Now, let's say you want to build your business, but you are married to the most wonderful spouse in the world, and your marriage is important to you. That’s fine – you can have those, provided that you accept that your friends and health will suffer. If you want to be healthy and succeed as a spouse and parent, you might have to slightly dial back your career ambitions.

Now, you are free to divide your time equally among all burners, but if you do, then you have to accept that you will never reach your full potential in any given area. You merely aren't devoting enough time to it. Here is the question you have to answer, and only you can answer the question. Would you rather live a life that is unbalanced but high-performing in a particular area, or would you rather live a balanced life, that never maximized your potential? I don’t claim to have it figured out. But I do know what works for me.

 Life Seasons

When I was in my 20's, I was all about getting a good job and making money. Then at 22, I got married and had a child by 24, so work and family became number one, and friends fell by the wayside. By my mid-30s, I was figuring who I was, what type of man I was going to be, and what my professional pursuits looked like. My son was getting older, and he was a bit more self-sufficient, plus my wife was able to take care of him, so I started getting into work again. I got divorced, needed to look good to attract a new lady, health and looking good became number one.

When the pandemic hit a couple of months ago, there was no question we are in the midst of an exceptional moment, not only for each of us but in history. The sense of normal for all of us has been disrupted in a significant way. As absolutely painful as it is, it provided a time to sit back, reassess and say, we all want things to return to normal, but what parts of normal do we want to return to? For an athlete, that means probably longing for teammates, athletic competition, practices, weight room sessions – these are the things worth noticing.

From the Inside Out….

We all have a choice, and the fact is we will have an unbalanced life—high performing in some areas, balanced in other areas, and potential in a burner or two. To dig deeper, we need to ask ourselves, can we:

 Outsource burners? What can help you save time? Consider using one of the countless apps to help you get through grocery shopping faster and allow you to spend precious time with your friends and family. Take more laundry to the dry cleaner, knowing that it will free up time for something else! Outsourcing is a necessary part of the balance that we all seek.

Embrace constraints? Do you embrace your constraints? How can we embrace our constraints rather than agonize over the endless time pressures we face? For example, can I embrace the time I have and maximize it to its fullest? If I can only work out two days this week, what workout regime will help me get the best workout?

Accept the seasons of life? Think about life and the burners as seasons of life. Recognize that some seasons you may need to focus on certain burners more than others.

Life is the marathon, not a sprint—the symbolism of the burners is that you work on balance continuously-through the seasons. We all have constraints on time and energy. Unfortunately, our choices come with consequences. The critical question, which burner are you going to turn down this season?