Harmony

In business, in school, and in our own personal lives, we love to put things into boxes.

We pretend that the boxes are independent. They have no bearing on any other boxes.

This creates perceptions of unfairness or of “balance”. We believe there is a perfect “balance” between the boxes of personal life and work, between the accounting department and the engineering department, and so on.

The thing is… those boxes are fake, arbitrary social-constructs which are far from being independent.

Don’t believe me?

Riddle me this… If you have a rough morning at home, what’s the likelihood you will have just a perfect day at work?

Balance is not the goal. Harmony is.

Rather than competing for time, resources, and energy, what if we disolved those arbitrary lines just long enough to see the big picture? To understand the connections between our “boxes”? To see how the efforts actually work to push everyone forward?

This is my own opinion, but I think we’d all be happier if we stopped splitting ourselves into increasingly many fragments for the ever increasing number of boxes available in life.