MIND newsletter: Life is filled with tradeoffs
Happy Saturday everyone! 😉
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This week has brought about its own set of challenges, seeing my friends undergoing hardships. In Vietnamese culture, there’s a proverb saying that good things happen to good people. I used to naively believe in it until the age of 18, when I witnessed the unfortunate circumstances that good people around me were confronted with. This week has again brought me back to that year, back to my contemplation about life’s fairness, and to the realization that none of us has everything. “Life is Filled with Tradeoffs.”
Deciding whether to settle down in Canada or Vietnam is a constant struggle in my heart and mind, a sentiment shared by many of my fellow immigrants. It’s not merely about preferences like food, culture, or quality of life. Instead, each country seems to represent one or two of the four burners on my stove.
The four burners theory
You might be familiar with the Four Burners theory, which likens life to a stove with four burners – family, friends, health, and work. Just as a stove’s energy is finite, so too is our life’s energy. The theory suggests that:
In order to be successful, you have to cut off one of your burners. In order to be really successful, you have to really cut off two.
As James Clear said in his blog, the first time I read this, I instantly sought a shortcut – a way to circumvent it. “Well, you know, it depends on how you define success. Maybe I don’t have to cut any of those four and still be happy and successful – just not the success like how people usually expect”, I thought. I mean, I did try really hard to find a way to say ‘maybe it’s true for others, except me.’
It didn’t take me too long to realize that I had never achieved that elusive balance people call ‘work-life balance.’ There was a time when I turned off the health burner to fuel the work one, only to later shut down work completely in order to safeguard my health and my family.
We all know that life is filled with tradeoffs. But what else can we do to make this acceptance a little more evident and easier in our lives? One of the suggestions Clear offers to address this balance issue is breaking life into seasons of imbalance.
I wish life were as predictable as weather changes, allowing us to anticipate the shifting seasons. Unfortunately, unpredictability is inherent, as exemplified by my friend’s sudden battle with cancer and the fragility of our parents’ health.
The quest for the right balance remains elusive, and I don’t have a definitive answer. Yet the only thing I think we can do, and something within our control, as wisely shared by my friend, is to “try to do each thing at the moment it comes as if it were the only thing to be done and, having done it, turn to the next duty in a similar spirit” – whether it’s spending an hour with family, sharing a 10-minute chat with a friend, savoring a bowl of rice, or engaging in a team meeting.
Be fully present, both for them and for yourself.
