Imagine that your life is represented by a stove with four burners on it. Each burner
symbolizes one major part of your life. The first represents your family.
The second represents your friends. The third your health.
And The fourth burner your work.
Now imagine that there’s only a limited amount of ‘gas’ to use for each of the
burners, such that not all your burners could burn equally. You would need to sacrifice
the intensity of one of the burners to make room for another one to burn stronger.
The Four Burners Theory says that “in order to be successful you have to cut off one of
your burners. And in order to be really successful you have to cut off two.”
My initial reaction to The Four Burners Theory was to find a way to bypass it. Was it possible
for me to succeed and keep all four burners running? Maybe I could combine two burners
into one like lumping family and friends into one category or something like that.
There is, however, some truth to the four burners theory. If you think back to any major
personal achievement in school or your career, you probably sacrificed one or more of the
major areas of your life. The necessity of sacrifice for success is
one of the downsides of work-life balance, which underestimates the high volume of hours
required on a daily basis to become a top performer in any field.
This leaves you with a tricky choice. Would you rather live a life that is unbalanced,
but high-performing in a certain area? Or would you rather live a life that is balanced,
but never maximizes operating at full capacity in any one thing?
But there has to be a better way. Well, author James Clear who wrote Atomic
Habits, which is one of my favorite habit-building books and I’m going to link that down in
the description below, has mentioned that there are three ways to improve your relationship
with The Four Burners Theory and I think this might help provide some perspective.
Option 1: Outsource Your Burners
This is actually something that we do fairly othen. We order takeout so we don't have to
cook at home. We purchase every single thing on Amazon so we don’t have to actually go
to the store. Or we get a Roomba so we don’t have to clean our homes.
Outsourcing small portions of your life allows you to save time and spend it elsewhere. Could
you apply the same logic to one part of your life and free up time to focus on the other
three things? For many people, their career is the most
important part of their lives. It is where they spend the most time and it is the last
burner to get turned off. But even something like that can be outsourced by hiring employees
or building systems that can automate your work for you. The one thing to bear in mind,
however, is whether you can continue to keep that burner running in a meaningful way once
you remove yourself from the equation.
Option 2: Embrace Constraints
One of the most frustrating parts of The Four Burners Theory is that it highlights your
shortcomings. You might say to yourself, “If only I had more time, I could make more money
or get in shape or spend more time at home.” A great way to manage this problem is to shift
your focus from wishing you had more time to maximizing the time you do have. In other
words, you embrace your limitations. So it might be better for you to ask yourself this
question, “Considering that I’m operating within these constraints, how can I be as
effective as possible?”
So if I can only write for 30 minutes each day, how can I finish my script for this video
the best I can? Or if I can only exercise for a couple hours
each week, how can I stay as fit as possible?
Asking yourself these questions helps switch your mind towards something positive, which
is getting the most out of what you have available, rather than focusing on the negative and worrying
about how you’re going to make things work and never having enough time to do the things
that you want to do.
Option 3: Incorporating The Seasons of Life
The third way is to break your life into seasons. What if, instead of searching for perfect
work-life balance at ALL times, you focused on a particular area at one point of your
life and shifted your focus over time? The importance of your burners may change
throughout your life. When you are in your 20s or 30s and have less
responsibility, it can be easier to get to the gym and chase career ambitions, but that
may not always stay the same as life goes on. You don't have to give up on your dreams
forever, but life can make it a little tricky to keep all four burners going at once. Perhaps
you need to press pause on something for a short period of time. You can do it all in
your lifetime, but just maybe not at the exact same time.
We’ve often viewed work-life balance as aspirational and something close to a 50-50
split. But the truth is that the idea of balance can be misleading. It makes you believe that
you can have it all, when instead you should aim to find harmony between your work and
other parts of your life, because when you have harmony, you will be much fueled to turn
the flame up on whatever you’re focusing on.
Look, Life consists entirely of tradeoffs. This fact will never change. It’s something
we have to make peace with and that’s the essence of this matter - In that true happiness
and satisfaction can come from good choices and adapting to the changes that life inevitably
brings. And maybe if we watch the flames on our stove,
we might even save ourselves from getting burned.
If you liked this video, I make a lot of them. Subscribe to the channel for more from me
every week or visit Vihan Chelliah.com to stay in touch and get a copy of my free productivity
cheatsheet. That’s it. Thanks for watching.