We should all stop with this modern obsession of having a perfectly balanced, optimised life (8 hours sleep, daily cardio + gym, eat well, deep work, etc.)
Most exceptional lives are heavily overallocated somewhere and any pursuit of greatness (in business, art, sport, research) requires big sacrifices.
Online gurus love selling this perfect recipe of life but reality is you only have a 24h day. No way you can sleep 8h, do 10k steps, gym, morning sunlight, read, eat perfectly, do 9h of deep work, see friends, maintain a relationship and somehow be happy through all of it.
I think a better thing for ambitious people is to think of life in seasons: a year obsessed with work, then a period focused on health, family, travel, etc. You can be massively overallocated to one thing for a while without deciding that’s what your entire life should look like. Balance probably makes more sense measured over years than every single day.
Probably because the people who genuinely “love their work” are usually obsessive enough to sacrifice at least one of the other four.
A perfectly balanced life often just means nothing in it is compelling enough to disrupt the schedule. Eight hours of sleep, daily gym, perfect meals. No idea, project or obsession pulling hard enough to ruin the routine.
And the people loudly claiming all five online are usually selling you the sixth thing: coaching, supplements, courses, content, etc.
