Out of Balance on Balance

It's a big week here for my family. My only kid, a high school senior, had his first lead role in a musical theatre production. Let me tell you, watching your quiet, studious, 6-foot tall son perform the smarmy Lord Farquaad to a packed house of 800 is a nice parental moment.

After a weekend show, I was chatting with one of the few adults supervising the production, someone who has worked with a broad range of students over many years, and she was saying lots of nice things about my boy....so naturally I let her talk as long as she wanted. What she said gave me pause.

We were discussing the long, long hours necessary to get a production of this size off the ground, how the effort relies so much on volunteering, and students going above & beyond. She said that my son was a kid who goes "all in". Nice to hear, of course.

But this soundbite tripped me up: "That ability to go 'all in', you'd be surprised how few kids today have it, and it's less and less every year. They're a dying breed."

Chilling, yes. Surprising, no.

When I think about current educational dogma, popular business ideology, fashionable leadership trends, and all the content I read here on LinkedIn. What's the buzzword I can't get away from?

Balance

What job posting would be complete without boasting of the organization's complete and total dedication to "Work-Life Balance"? You can't swing a dead cat on LI without hitting a newly-minted founder gushing about how they spend 60 hours a week having tea parties with their daughters (...after their start-up was funded of course)

Balanced diet, balanced time, balanced relationships, balanced life. Sounds good.

On paper.

The problem lays, as it so often does, with reality.

As I look back on my own life (sample size = 1) and I tally up the list of what I consider my greatest accomplishments, both personal and professional, I don't see a lot of Balance.

I do see a lot of single-mindedness, repeated commitment to narrow and often unpopular objectives, tunnel vision, passion cum mania, and borderline obsession.

But not balance.

It just doesn't work that way for me. And it doesn't work that way for a whole bunch of successful people I know. In fact, the vast majority.

So why do we teach and promote Balance as a be-all, end-all, cure-all?

When my son signed up to audition for this, his first high school musical, I was supportive and said "fine, as long as you keep your grades up, continue doing your household chores, take care of yourself, stay involved with other student activities, etc." He agreed.

Then he didn't do ANY of that. He plowed into this thing he was passionate about with everything he had, nearly to the exclusion of all else, a man possessed. Slept little, ate little, some weeks I didn't see him for days. And how do you think that turned out?

He extended the boundaries of who he was. He overcommitted and failed at things, many for the first time. He learned that actions have consequences and that?there are no solutions, only trade-offs. He fell down, both literally and figuratively. He grew. And, as a secondary benefit, turned in a killer performance that he'll remember the rest of his life.

All?very?un-balanced. None of which would have happened if he had done things the homogenized, equalized, and even-keeled way that I had dictated. He avoided the tyranny of Balance, and in the process achieved excellence.

It begs the question, would you rather live a life where you are "pretty good" at everything, or where you are truly excellent at one or two things and blissfully mediocre at the rest? I know what I would choose, and what I have chosen.

"Remember when we worked 23 straight days to deliver on time?", "I chased her for two years before she would go out with me. We've been married 10 years last month", "We finally got it to work at 2:00 AM, saved the sale", "I walked out of the board meeting in the middle of my presentation, drove through the storm and made it just as my son took the stage".

These are the kind of stories successful people tell. Personally, I owe whatever success I've had to making choices just like these.

To be clear, my choices aren't your choices. But they?should be choices, open to everyone. And I am beginning to feel that the intense focus on Balance works to deprive people of, or at least discourage, that choice.

That's wrong.

I am reminded of the Japanese proverb, “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down”. And that hammer is beautifully embossed with the word "Balance". I'm not here to make everyone the same by lowering them to an even level. I'm here to enable everyone I influence to become the best that they choose to be.

As a leader, I've become scared to death of suggesting that my people might occasionally work weekends or into the evening on something they care about. That means for some of them, I am actively depriving them of the potential for greatness, to strive greatly and fail, or to lay exhausted on the field of battle, victorious. All in the sacred name of Balance.

That must stop.

To be sure, Balance is a solution to many issues. But not to every issue. It is often not the best answer, but it has very often become the easiest answer.

Easy answers should always be suspect.