When Nigel turned 40, he decided to step back from the work force and spend a year at home with his wife and four young children. “I found it quite easy to balance work and life when I didn’t have any work. Not a very useful skill, especially when you’re not making money,” he says. He then returned to work and spent the past seven years, studying the work/life balance, and came up with four observations.

1). If society is to make progress we need an honest debate. The core issue is that certain jobs and career choices are fundamentally incompatible with being meaningfully engaged on a day to day basis with a young family.There are 1,000’s of people working long hours at jobs they don’t like to buy things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like.

2). Governments and corporation aren’t going to solve the issues for us. It’s up to us as individuals to take control and design the life you want. It’s important that you never put the quality of your life in the hands of a commercial corporation. Commercial companies are inherently designed to get as much out of you as they can get away with. It’s in their DNA. We have to be responsible for setting and enforcing the boundaries that we want in our life.

3). We have to be careful with the time frame that we chose upon which to judge our balance. We need to be realistic. You can’t do it all in one day.

We need to elongate the time frame without falling into the trap of thinking

A day is too short; after I retire is too long. There has got to be a middle way.

4). We need to approach balance in a balanced way. Other parts to life are:

To be balanced we need to attend to all areas.Nigel tells a story about spending time with one of his four kids. He took Harry to a park, then to eat pizza. Back home he gave him a bath, read him a story and tucked him into bed. As Nigel left Harry’s room, Harry said, “Dad,this has been the best day of my life. EVER.”

“I hadn’t done anything. Hadn’t taken him to Disneyworld or bought him a PlayStation,” Nigel remarked.

Nigel points out that small things do matter.“Being more balanced doesn’t mean dramatic upheaval in your life. With the smallest investment in the right places, you can radically transform the quality of your relationships and the quality of your life. Moreover, I think it can transform society.””We can change society’s definition of success away from the moronically simplistic notion that the person with the most money when he dies wins,to a more thoughtful and balanced definition of what a life well lived looks like.”

So what are your questions or comments for Nigel?
I highly recommend his book, Fat, Forty and Fired. I shall post his responses to your questions in a future blog post. (Nigel has a deadline for his upcoming book.)