Balance Is Important—Knowing When to Live Out of Balance May Be More Important
Living with life balance is essential for sustainable success. It involves identifying the key areas of your life, setting minimum standards for each, and juggling them to keep everything in play. This approach helps prevent constant emergencies and brings stability. However, there’s a paradox to achieving balance:
Sometimes, to maintain balance in the long term, you must allow for temporary imbalance.
Life is dynamic and often demands focused effort to achieve meaningful progress. For instance, starting a new job, pursuing a unique professional opportunity, or addressing a personal or health crisis may require stepping out of balance temporarily to succeed.
The Push and Pull of Balance
Maintaining life balance isn’t always straightforward. While balance brings stability and peace, temporary imbalance can lead to breakthroughs, growth, and achievements. This ongoing tension between stability and focused effort is a natural part of life.
The key is recognizing that life balance is not a fixed state—it’s a fluid process. The goal isn’t to avoid imbalance entirely but to manage it thoughtfully, ensuring you return to stability over time. By embracing this approach, you can leverage both balance and moments of intense focus to build a fulfilling and successful life.
The Radical Build: A Temporary Shift in Focus
Early in my career, I had the opportunity to write a state-of-the-art paper on my emerging research: the role of psychosocial factors in heart disease. The paper, destined for Circulation, a leading cardiology journal, was an incredible chance to influence the field.
To seize this opportunity, I entered what I call the Radical Build.
A radical build is a conscious decision to step out of life balance temporarily to achieve a specific goal. During this period, you deliberately limit or put aside other important areas of your life to focus on a critical objective.
For nearly four months, I dedicated almost every waking hour to researching and writing the paper with two colleagues. I worked late nights, occasionally slept at the office, stopped exercising, ignored friends, and let everyday tasks slide.
The result? A comprehensive review article with 279 references, cited in over 4,000 medical publications, which helped launch my career in Behavioral Cardiology.
Looking back, however, I realize I was metaphorically playing with fire.
The Dangers of the Radical Build
While the Radical Build can lead to remarkable achievements, it also carries significant risks. Think of it as a tool with a black box warning: use sparingly and only when necessary.
During a Radical Build, you may become highly efficient in your chosen area of focus. By temporarily setting aside the constraints of normative life balance, you free up time and energy to devote entirely to a singular pursuit.
In this process, you might also enter what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described as a state of “flow”—a deeply enjoyable mental state where you experience peak performance and total immersion in your work. While this can be rewarding and highly productive, it can also be dangerously addictive, making it easy to remain in Radical Build mode longer than necessary.
Ideally, a Radical Build should last for a relatively short period, preferably weeks rather than months. My own experience exceeded this ideal because I became deeply engrossed in the project and stayed in Radical Build mode longer than I should have.
For some, the radical build becomes a permanent lifestyle. These are the workaholics who sacrifice balance indefinitely, often at great personal cost. This danger of radical building becoming a permanent way of life cannot be overemphasized. Thus, you must approach it with care. Here is how:
Setting Boundaries for the Radical Build
- Ensure it’s worth it. Evaluate whether the goal truly justifies stepping out of balance. Communicate your priorities to family, colleagues, or friends to align expectations.
- Set clear time limits. Establish a start and end date for your Radical Build. Write them down and stick to them to avoid unnecessary extensions.
- Maintain minimum standards. Don’t completely neglect other areas of life. For example, instead of abandoning exercise, reduce it to short weekly sessions to maintain momentum.
- Create a failsafe. Share your plan with a trusted accountability partner who can help you stay grounded.
- Plan for recovery. Once the goal is achieved, take intentional steps to restore balance. Rest, nurture relationships, and refocus on personal growth.
- Limit Radical Builds to critical moments. Use this strategy only for pivotal opportunities or challenges to avoid burnout and imbalance.
The Bottom Line
Life balance and focused effort are not opposing forces—they are complementary. The key is to manage them intentionally. Embrace the Radical Build when necessary, but establish life balance as your default state.
By doing so, you can achieve big goals and meaningful milestones without sacrificing your health, relationships, or well-being. Success and balance are not mutually exclusive; they are interconnected elements of a fulfilling and intentional life.
