The secret of success: finding balance and something completely different: in my case fixie building
There is something to be said for finding balance in one's life - if you do a lot of sedentary work, you need to balance it with some physical exercise, if you spend time doing a lot of strategic work and dealing with organisations and people, you need to balance it with rolling up your sleeves and doing something very practical and if you work hard you need to chill every now and then. That balance of Yin and Yang, of stimulus and relaxation, of extremes is certainly very important for me in order to keep working at a high pace and not get sick of things, despite some of the set backs and difficulties one inevitably encounters.
This is also something I've learned since my twenties where I (like I'm sure many young people) was rearing to do stuff, work hard, prove myself and often to the detriment of both my health, sleep and the things, which help continuous learning.
In fact research is coming out now proving that if you want to sustain a high degree of learning ability (and not get into information overload, which is the brain equivalent of your muscles hurting from too much exercise) you need to keep exercising, because this provides your brain with valuable oxygen and increased blood circulation, which rids the brain of excess hormones, adrenalin, cortisol etc, (formed when you are stressed), which get in the way of new neural connections forming.
This finding is even more important when you consider how fast you need to move these days in order to stay ahead of competition - your single-most important competitive advantage as an individual and organisation becomes your ability to learn. The quicker you can do this and improve, the better your chances of staying ahead of the curve. But almost everything in our working lives is working contrary to this - we work long hours, eat badly, smoke, drink, do excessive amounts of air travel - you name it: none of these things are conducive to setting ourselves up for optimal learning and performing at out optimum.
So the responsibility to look after ourselves falls back on ourselves and our ability to identify when we need a break, something else to stimulate us and also the discipline to push ourselves to go for a spin, even when we are utterly exhausted from working long hours, has to come from ourselves. That responsibility for keeping the engine running smoothly rests solely with ourselves and I believe it's a lifelong quest for anyone to get it right, a 100% of the time. Yet, even if we can improve our lives to be a little better than before, that alone means we've done ourselves a huge favour.
So now for something completely different! Below is a slide show of my fixie building pursuits this summer - completely different from what I do on a day to day basis, but very rewarding too - in addition to all the cycling that this encourages me to do too!
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