Seamless Flow

“Truly successful people do not forsake the other parts of their lives to achieve success in their professional and public lives; to the contrary, they find creative ways to embrace their family, community, and personal lives.”

- Stew Friedman

Too many people believe that to achieve great things we must make brutal sacrifices, to succeed in work we must focus single-mindedly, at the expense of everything else in life. Even those who reject the idea of a zero-sum game fall prey to a kind of binary thinking revealed by the term we use to describe the ideal lifestyle: ‘work/life balance’. The idea that ‘work’ competes with ‘life’ ignores ‘life’ is actually the intersection and interaction of four major domains: work, home, community, and the private self. Most successful people are those who can harness the passions and powers of the various parts of their lives to achieve ‘four-way wins’—actions that result in life being better in all four domains. Thus, integration, not balance, is a better lens to view how one navigates work and the rest of life.

Let us take the case of Jenna Porter, a forty-eight-year-old mother of three children, who worked as a manager at a small real estate consulting firm in Philadelphia. She enjoyed considerable success. And, yet, like many people, she was not satisfied with how things were going in her life. She reflected further: 

Work infringes completely on the quantity and 

quality of the time I spend with my family. I’ve missed 

out on too much of my children’s lives. And I’ve 

allowed other areas of my life to suffer. I’m too busy to 

read, go hear live music, or do other things I love, and 

I’ve only managed to promote my physical health— 

like walking in the woods—for short periods of time. 

I can’t help thinking that my work suffers from the

dissatisfaction I feel elsewhere.