People talk about balance a lot.

It usually comes up into the topic of the balance between work and life. People preach that you must find some type of balance between the two to be happy and fulfilled.

Not only is this way of thinking about it completely wrong but its hurtful to your overall quality of life.

You see, the word “balance” implies a bunch of misleading things. It creates this vision in the mind of a Teeter Totter with weights on each side; one representing life, the other representing work. This idea of balance is that we want to have the same weight on each side to create this feeling of “balance in our lives”.

The problem is that life doesn’t work like this.

There isn’t a battle between work and life that we need to optimize for because life is work and work is life – they are the same thing or at least part of the same thing. Humans decided to create this imaginary divide.

Saying we need to balance implies that they are siloed off and are in their own categorizes of reality. This makes it hard for people to think about how they can achieve this nirvana of “work life balance”.

A more empowering way to look at them is to think in terms of integration and synergy. Is going for a walk in nature while you listen too an audio book about business – is that about work or life?

‍David Ogilvy apparently asked one young writer how many hours he wrote each day. The young writer proudly said 10 hours a day. David then said: “That’s a shame. You should spend 8 hours looking for what to write and two hours writing it.”

Life and marketing isn’t about putting things into compartments – its about finding out interesting ways to make both work together in an integrated way.

That’s where the magic and innovation of life comes from – in the cross pollination of two seamless opposite things.