This is part of an ongoing series called “50 Things I’m Teaching My Kids”: values and lessons I’m imparting to my children because they’re not going to get it anywhere else.
“Life is all about balance”. Everyone has heard that one before.
This is actually an incorrect way to live.
If life were all about balance, then if you have low levels of everything in perfect balance then you would be happy, fulfilled, and life would be great. This is obviously untrue.
Also, if life were all about balance, this precludes the opportunity to pursue excellence. This is obviously undesirable.
As we know, humans who are impoverished in every way (but perfectly balanced!) are perfectly miserable. Humans who are mediocre in every way (but perfectly balanced!) are also miserable.
Here’s a more accurate description of how to live:
Life is about feeding all of the wolves that you need to feed.
An old tale
One night, while warming themselves by the campfire, the little boy asked his grandfather how to life a good life.
The old man said, “Little one, there is a constant battle within our souls that is waged by many wolves.
On one side are the wolves named Jealousy, Loneliness, Nihilism, Despair, and Hate.
On the other side are the wolves named Abundance, Family, Faith, Hope, and Love.”
The little boy thought on this awhile, and then said, “Grandfather, which wolves will win the war?”
The old man smiled. “The wolves that you feed.”
Pick the right wolves to feed
The wolves that you need to feed are aspects of life that, for human beings, need to be fulfilled to a satisfactory measure.
So, it is critical to identify which wolves to feed. Here’s a few of them:
Basic needs: Acquisition of food, water, and comfortable shelter.
Family: People who are related to you in some way that you see every day.
Community: A sense of belonging to a group of people.
Physical health: Feeding the body with healthful foods and exercise.
Mental health: Feeding the mind with knowledge and warding against mental illnesses.
Spiritual health: Feeding the soul with spiritual food.
Financial health: Feeding your financial system to increase financial independence.
Entertainment: Helpful distraction from the everyday routine.
Career fulfillment: Pursuing work that wards off boredom, vice, and need.
Contribution: Giving back to the world at large.
Don’t allow any of your good wolves to go hungry
You need to feed every wolf for your life to flourish. If one wolf starves, it is very difficult to bring that wolf back to a healthy state.
This is where the axiom “life is all about balance” fails.
Wolves can be perfectly balanced in poverty. Impoverished and starving is a bad state to be in.
For instance, for life to be in reasonably good shape you need to feed your needs for family, economic security, all areas of health, and many other things. If any one of these needs are neglected for too long, then, trouble.
If you ignore your economic needs by foregoing work, life takes a dive. Ignore a minimum of physical exercise, disease creeps in. Forgetting to feed yourself food will make you starve to death.
You need to make sure your wolves are properly fed to the point that they don’t starve. But that doesn’t mean they need to be fed in equal proportions.
Emphasizing stronger wolves while not letting others starve
As your wolves grow and flourish, it may be that you want to make some wolves stronger. You may want to pick a leader of the pack. Even though you might pick a pack leader, you need to make sure that the remainder of the pack continues to thrive.
In this way you can pursue excellence through focus.
You may want to dedicate your life to raising a family. Or, your career may turn out to be a vocation deserving of the majority of your time. While pursuing excellence in one area, you must maintain a minimum of effort on all other necessary areas of life.
It is ok to have some wolves be stronger than others. It is not ok to let your weaker wolves starve in service to your pack leader.
This is another flaw of “life is all about balance”. If life had to be balanced all of the time, this precludes the pursuit of excellence.
Certainly, in life there may be times when it is necessary and even desirable to focus on one area of life at the near-exclusion of all others. Post-secondary study is one such example. Training for a marathon is another. Even though there may be some such periods, they need to be temporary rather than prolonged, and never to the extreme point where some of your wolves starve to death.
There are many men who pay far too much attention on their careers and not enough on their kids, who end up hating their fathers as they enter adolescence. The problem here isn’t the focus on career excellence—it’s allowing the father-child relationship to starve to death.
Emphasizing your stronger wolves is totally ok as long as your other wolves are still properly fed and don’t starve. You can have family values over all else, as long as you have satisfactory levels of health in all other areas. You can have career excellence, but only if your family life and other areas of life are being healthily fed.
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Feeding all your wolves ensures good health while keeping the door open for excellence. As you grow, the identity and importance of each wolf will become apparent.
-Anthony Kim