People often talk about the balance between life and work as if they are always competing with each other and we can only pick one way or the other. The truth might not be so, and they might even do help to each other, well, sometimes at least. It’s undeniable that our time and energy can be on one thing at a time, life or work, but if we take a step further and consider what’s behind the actual time and energy spent on what we are doing, we might find something common between these two, like the way we think, the steps we take to analyze the problem and then take actions, how we handle challenges, how we manage our time, etc.
In our work, especially when we are working with some smart and brilliant people, we can learn quite a lot of things which we can not learn from books or trainings, like how to better handle difficult issues or unexpected problems, how to better manage our time, how to communicate with others, etc. These are valuable things for us to do our work well and to keep a good relationship with our workmates, our clients, our boss, our reports and so on, and (this is a big AND) we can apply these things to our life as well, to our interaction with family members and friends, and even to some people we might only parter with temporarily in some special occasions of our life.
In our life, we might have some other valuable lessons learnt from what we have experienced, the success after we insist on something we think is correct or after we give up something we think is wrong, or the failures when we do it the other way around, the thoughts after some events which have had deep impression to ourselves, etc. And these valuable lessons can help much as well in our work when we are in similar situations.
It’s true that we should not spend too much time and energy on work like a robot, like the very famous 996 working mode (9 am – 9 pm, and six days every week), but life and work should not be in the black-or-white relation. Actually, I tend to believe they are two important parts of who we are and when needed, we can and should take some time and energy from one of them to the other so that we can really balance them well and get the best outcomes from both of them as we can.