For those of my classmates who inadvertently invested in lives of hollow unhappiness, I can't help but believe that their troubles stemmed from incorrectly allocating resources. To a person, they were well-intended...intending to build a satisfying personal life alongside their professional life, making choices specifically to provide a better life for their family, they unwittingly overlook their spouse and children. Investing time and energy in these relationships doesn't offer them that same immeiate sense of achievement that a fast track career does. You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis it doesn't seem as if things are deteriorating. Your spouse is still there when you get home every night... In fact, you'll often see the same sobering pattern when looking at the personal lives of many ambitious people. Though they may believe that their family is deeply important to them, they actually allocate fewer and fewer resources to the things they would say matter most...
It's rarely easy. Even when you know what your true priorities are, you'll have to fight to uphold them in your own mind every day. For example, like many of you, I suspect, I'm naturally drawn to interesting problems and challenges. I can lose myself in one for hours...but I know that spending my time this way is not consistent with my priorities. I've had to force myself to stay aligned with what matters most to me by setting hard stops, barriers, and boundaries in my life--such as leaving the office at six every day so that there is daylight time to play catch with my son..I have to be clear with myself that the long-term payoff of investing my resources in thie sphere of my life will be far more profound.
...there is no one-size-fits-all approach that anyone can offer you. The hot water that softens a carrot will harden an egg. As a parent, you will try many things with your child that simply won't work. When this happens, it can be very easy to view it as a failure. Don't. If anything, it's the opposite... Instead, you have just learend what does not work. You now know to try something else.
Intimate, loving, and enduring relationships with our family and close friends will be amont the sources of the deepest joy in our lives. They are worth fighting for.
The relationships you have with family and close friends are going to be the most important sources of happiness in your life. but you have to be careful. When it seems like everything at home is going well, you will be lulled into believing that you can put your investments in these relationships onto the back burner. That would be an enormous mistake . By the time serious problems arise in those relationships, it often is too late to repair them. This means, almost paradoxically, that the time when it is most important to invest in building strong families and close friendships is when it appears, at the surface, as if it's not necessary.
Each of us can point to one or two friendships we've unintentionally neglected when life got busy. You might be hoping that the bonds of your friendship are strong enough to endure such neglect, but that's seldom the case. Even the most committed friends will attempt to stay the course for only so long before they choose to invest their own time, energy, and friendship somewhere else.
I genuinely believe that relationships with family and close friends are one of the greatest sources of happiness in life. It sounds simple, but like any important investment, these relationships need consistent attention and care. But there are two forces that will be constantly working against this happening First, you'll be routinely tempted to invest your resources elsewhere--in things that will provide you with a more immediate payoff. And second, your family and friends rarely shout the loudest to demand your attention. They love you and they want to support your [career] too. That can add up to neglecting the people you care about most in the world. If you don't nurture and develop those relationships, they won't be there to support you if you find yourself traversing some of the more challenging stretches of life, or as one of the most important sources of happiness in your life.
"Treat people as if they were what they outhg to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being."--Goethe
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