#PositiveVibes - The Burn Box

By John R. Nocero

The VIBE: Spending time in the burn box is playing with fire – eventually, it will touch you and burn you up. But if you control it, it makes you red hot.

Neil Parischa said, that “life’s too short not to sleep when you feel like it.” So true. As Pietrak summarizes here, Pasricha’s written a book, called The Happiness Equation.

In it, he lays out a scribble with four quadrants. On one axis is “doing,” high and low, on the other, “thinking,” high and low. We are always in one of four boxes, he says. They are summarized in the graphic above.

Pietrak says the Burn Box, is the state of high doing and high thinking. Many of the high achievers all of us know are surely shoveling madness into the burn box at an amazing rate. Spending time in the burn box is playing with fire – eventually, it will touch you and burn you up. I was there earlier this year. As Pietrak himself noted, he was one more Pomodoro from coming completely off the rails.

 But if you can control it, it can make you red hot. You control it by spending time in the other boxes.

The other three beautiful quadrants are these:

• The Space Box is the perfect opposite of Burn: low thinking, low doing. It’s the sandy beach vacation, or a cold beer with your feet hanging off the dock, up at the lake, or Strat.
• In the Think Box, our mental fires are raging but we’re not doing much of anything. Thinking. Journaling. Talking to a friend. Composing.
• The Doing Box is pure activity: building a shed, doing yoga or climbing a mountain—and not letting our monkey mind have a say in it. Just do it. Be present.

One thing I have learned is complete and successful people move freely and often between these boxes. Achieving success some of the time is easy. But if you want to sustain it over a period of days, months, years and DECADES, pick up a fire extinguisher and visit the kinder, gentler boxes from time to time.

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