The Balancing Act: Can You Really Have It All?

Mastering Life's Four Burners

Dear readers,

Life lately has been a whirlwind and I noticed myself trying to do everything, all at once. I quickly got reminded that this is not a new feeling, I have been in this place several times.

Here’s a sketch I drew last December when I felt life was moving too fast and I was playing catch up all the time.

Time & again, one of the frameworks I’ve used to try & strike balance is the Four Burners Theory.

Picture your life as a four-burner stove. Each burner represents a crucial aspect of your existence:

1. Family flames on the first burner

2. Friendships sizzle on the second

3. Health simmers on the third

4. Work boils on the fourth¹

The Four Burners of Life

The Four Burners Theory proposes a challenging idea: To achieve success, you must shut one burner. To reach extraordinary success, you need to turn off two.

If you’re like me, you know how challenging of a task this is. So what do we do? Can we have it all? Let’s explore!

My first reaction to this was “I can circumvent this!” I believed I can rely on my systems & processes that will take me ahead and maybe I will cook up a feast with all 4 burners cranked up and enjoy a hearty meal at the end of everyday. I started finding workarounds - maybe I can club family & friends into one big relationships burner.

How about work & health together? I quickly realised I can’t club work & health, because work was demanding, and health has always been my top priority. Both have their seperate places and cannot be clubbed, at least for me. But I have seen people trying to get walking desks and thinking they are acing their fitness. Don’t be that person. Get in a standing/walking desk, sure, but also pay your dues at the gym!

After jostling for long (and failing), it hit me. I was whipping up all these workarounds because I didn't want to swallow the hard truth: life's a giant trade-off game.

The quicker you realise this is true, the easier it is to make peace with the fact that all four burners on full flame are only going to finish the gas sooner than you know and none of the dishes from your feast will see the light of day.

You could choose to divide your time equally on 4 burners, but that simply means that you might never reach your true potential on either.

At the heart of it, we are presented with a choice.

Would you prefer to live a life that is unbalanced but excels in a specific area, or a life that is balanced but never fully reaches your potential in any one aspect?

So, what do we do? How do we achieve the coveted ‘balance’ in our lives. Let’s dive in!

Having experimented enough in the past 4 years, I now know that to truly achieve success in one of the 4 areas, something has to give. When I was working on my health goals, I had to put my social life on the back burner to prioritise my fitness regime. Which meant seeing less of friends, family & sometimes even skipping out on some celebrations. Having achieved what I set out to, I am through and I don’t have to miss out on these commitments anymore. I am in a new phase and this has a new set of challenges & possibilities.

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I’m still exploring the best approach, but I’ve realised there are 3 effective strategies for achieving balance:

• Experience Life in Seasons: Like seasons, life is cyclical. Instead of trying to juggle it all at once, why not embrace the chaos and roll with the seasons.

  What if, instead of constantly striving for perfect work-life balance, you divided your life into seasons, each dedicated to focusing on a specific area?
  Allow yourself & the priority of your burners to change throughout life.

  In your twenties, you're all about crushing career goals, making new friends, finding your groove in many areas & (hopefully) hitting the gym. Fast forward a few years, and you find yourself building a family perhaps. For some of us our world starts to revolve around tiny humans who think you hang the moon.

  Fast forward another decade, and you might find yourself reviving old hobbies or finally bringing that dream project you once wrote about on a napkin back to life.
  
  Here's the thing: life rarely lets you keep all burners blazing at once. Sometimes, you've got to let one flame flicker lower for a while. It's not about giving up on your dreams; it's about recognizing which season you're in and embracing it fully.

  
  Additionally, dedicating yourself fully to one area can have a multiplier effect. You might achieve more by going all-in on a task for a few years than by giving it a lukewarm effort over fifty years.

  Perhaps it’s better to embrace seasons of imbalance and rotate through them as needed.

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• Delegating Burners: We often outsource small tasks in our lives. We hire cleaners to take care of our homes, use delivery services, and call in handymen for home repairs.

  Outsourcing these tasks frees up time for other activities. Can you apply the same strategy to one area of your life, freeing up time for the other three burners?

  Work is a prime example. Many people devote the most time to their work burner, making it the hardest to turn off. Entrepreneurs and business owners can outsource their work burner by hiring employees.

  Caring for the elderly is another example. Busy professionals often "outsource" the family burner by hiring caregivers or using assisted living facilities. While calling it outsourcing may seem harsh, they are essentially paying someone to keep the family burner running while they focus on other areas.

  The benefit of outsourcing is that it allows you to maintain the burner without dedicating your own time. However, the downside is the lack of personal involvement. Though I do find it helpful to delegate & outsource as much of my life as possible. So what parts of your life can you outsource but haven’t yet?

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• Embrace Constraints: One of the toughest aspects of The Four Burners Theory is realizing how much potential remains untapped.

  It’s easy to think, “If only I had more time, I could earn more, get fit, or spend more time with family.” Instead of wishing for extra hours, consider how to make the most of the time you have. Embrace your constraints and ask yourself, “Given these limitations, how can I be as effective as possible?”

  For example:

  • If I can only dedicate two hours a week to learning a new skill/subject, how can I accelerate my progress?

  • If I can only spend 30 minutes a day on personal projects, how can I complete them efficiently?

  • If I have just one hour a week for self-care, what will help expand its benefits?

  This approach shifts your focus from the frustration of limited time to the opportunity of optimizing what you have. Also makes you feel more grateful. Embracing constraints can actually enhance your performance and reduce procrastination.

  However, I will say that there are some downsides to this. Accepting constraints means acknowledging that you’re not operating at full capacity. While there are ways to “work smarter, not harder,” it’s hard to ignore that the time you invest in health, relationships, or career can lead to better results in those areas.

  But hey, we gotta work with what we have. We have to work with things we can control at this moment to live our life fully but also plan for the future.

  I am currently focused on some personal projects that are getting more demanding increasingly and I know I have to work with a given set of constraints which are my limited number of hours in the day + limited energy.

As a multipotentialite, learning to work with constraints and knowing that there’s only a certain kind of growth I can achieve has helped me immensely, because knowing that I am making progress is much better than regretting later that my beloved projects never saw the light of day. This combined with outsourcing parts of my life has helped me do work both on professional & personal fronts that I never would have thought I was capable of completing.

The Four Burners Theory² has shed light on a difficult reality for me: no one enjoys being told they can’t have it all, but everyone faces limits on their time and energy. Every choice comes with a price.

Which burners will you choose to turn down?

If you’re interested in receiving prompts to journal about the 4 Burners, please reply to me, and I will get back to you. Think of prompts on identifying burners, current constraints, strategies for maximizing effectiveness and more.

Until next Sunday!
Love, Ishita

P.S. If you enjoyed this dispatch, please click on the heart at the bottom or the top of this email. It helps others discover Masters Of Fate. And makes me super happy! :)

1. My favorite show MasterChef AU just ended, so bear with my cooking analogies. Oh btw, my favorite contestant won. What joy!

2. Another interpretation on the Four Burners Theory comes from author and speaker John Richardson. He describes a fifth burner: the central burner, which is purpose.