The Three Realms
In the 50s, the psychologist and Harvard professor Erik Erikson, known for coining the term identity crisis, published Childhood and Society and Identity and the Life Cycle, exploring the importance of balancing the various life domains for psychological well-being. “The richest and fullest lives,” Erikson once said, “attempt to achieve an inner balance between three realms: work, love, and play.” To focus solely on one while neglecting the others can lead to regret and emptiness, especially in later life. But to nurture all three realms with equal dedication, zeal, and enthusiasm paves the way for a life of accomplishment and inner peace. Filling the holes in one’s heart by pursuing the realms of life, and in the process achieving success and fulfilment—that’s the idea for today.
Ultimate Terror Realised
The presidential biographer and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin began her career at the White House in 1967 under the Lyndon B. Johnson administration. It was during this two-year tenure that she felt, unfiltered, the gruelling work ethic of her high-flying boss. In 1969, after toiling through the conflict in Vietnam, domestic race riots, and increasing crime rates, Johnson’s popularity dropped, and he was voted out of office. He retired to his ranch in Texas and asked Goodwin to join him and a team of writers to draft his memoirs. Goodwin agreed, and during that period, she had exclusive access to the ins and outs of his post-presidential life: personal thoughts, private conversations, how he liked his eggs, the number of cigarettes he smoked a day, his choice of whiskey, and all the habitual knick-knacks of a once-powerful man now in retirement. One would think that a man of such calibre would have everything to feel good in retirement—money, fame, power, land, people, a family that loved him—but strangely, “the Lyndon Johnson that I saw in the last years of his life…was a man who had spent so many years in the pursuit of work, power, and individual success that he had absolutely no psychic or emotional resources left to get him through the days once the presidency was gone.” It was not a case of burnout but years of devoting all his time and energy to the realm of work that made him immune to love and play. “The hole in his heart was so large,” Goodwin said, “that even the love of a family, without work, could not fill it.” Years later, through the study of the lives of past American presidents and with the close proximity to Johnson, it fired within Goodwin a drive to answer the question: What does it mean for one to live a rich and fulfilling life? As Johnson watched how the people of America looked toward a new president, forgetting all he had done for them, he fell into depression. “And because he was so sad and so vulnerable,” Goodwin said, “he opened up to me in ways he never would have had I known him at the height of his power—sharing his fears, his sorrows, and his worries.” At the tail end of his life, he lamented the words he should have actioned decades earlier: I should have spent more time with my children and their children. “But all was too late, when he died alone—ultimate terror realised.”
A Creature With Eight Arms and Three Hearts
Marques Brownlee, aka MKBHD, is the face behind one of the top tech review channels on YouTube, with 19.7 million subscribers. At the time of this video, there was a wave of OG YouTubers [Matti Haapoja, masteroogwgay, MatPat, Tom Scott, PewDiePie, Leon Hendrix] leaving the industry. Reasons cited were related to an imbalance of the three realms: I want to spend more time with my family, the work takes up too much of me that I can’t do anything else, I’m burned out. “When you ask the children of the 2010s and 2020s what they want to be when they grow up,” Brownlee says, “the most popular answer is YouTuber. But the point is, [even though] it’s a very sought-after job, a dream job is still a job.” Creating videos for an audience of 10 to 19.7 million is not play—it’s work. Often, when you start out as a creator, you’re not paid, and you’re trying to produce as much fun and engaging content as possible. Soon, your first gig comes along. Then your second. Then your third, your fourth, fifth. The difference now is that you’re being paid, and with money comes expectations. You’re no longer just a content creator, but also, Brownlee says, “a full-time writer…a full-time cinematographer…a full-time editor…you’re managing the inbox…you’re doing the invoicing…you’re working with brands…taxes…financial accounting…the PR…the management…all that content strategy—that’s a bunch of different hats.” You wouldn’t mind all that, but that is to pursue one aspect at the expense of another—“doing something that isn’t being creative when the job is still supposed to be the being creative part.” So, Brownlee advises: becoming a creator is like becoming an octopus, a creature with eight arms and three hearts, doing many things all at once. If you want to achieve success and fulfilment, “you want to find [the arms] that you specifically want to cut off” by delegating them to others so that you can focus on the three hearts—the realms of the job that remind you of why you love doing it in the first place.
Consumer, Pro, Desktop, Portable
In 1997, 12 years after he was ousted from his company, Steve Jobs returned to Apple as CEO. During his absence, the company experienced the worst crisis of its existence: its market share dropped from 15 percent to 3 percent as Microsoft dominated the personal computer market, brand identity became diluted, innovation was lost, and product lines became fragmented. By September 1997, Apple posted a net loss of $1.04 billion and was just “ninety days from being insolvent.” One of the first things Jobs did upon his return was to review the existing product line, which was made up of “tons of product, most of them crap” and a “dozen versions of the Macintosh…ranging from 1400 to 9600.” Jobs had people “explaining [the different versions to him] for three weeks.” Under the leadership of the previous CEO, the company tipped the balance towards profits, inevitably leading to too many variations of computers and an unclear market focus. Profits were prioritised at the expense of customer experience and clarity. Jobs himself was so confused that he resorted to asking, “Which one do I tell my friends to buy?” Finally, he had enough. “Stop!” Jobs snapped at a product strategy meeting. “This is crazy!” He grabbed a magic marker, briskly walked to the whiteboard, and sketched intersecting horizontal and vertical lines, forming a four-square quadrant. “Here’s what we need,” Jobs said. Atop the two columns, Jobs wrote “Consumer” and “Pro.” He labelled the two rows “Desktop” and “Portable.” Apple’s priority now was simple: to balance the product line with equal zeal, dedication, and enthusiasm by making four great products—one for each quadrant. “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,” Jobs said. “That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.” And if that’s true for products, it’s true for life. By the first quarter of 1998, after years of staggering losses, Apple filled the holes in its balance sheet with a $45 million profit, and “for the full fiscal year of 1998, it would turn in a $309 million profit.”
What I Have Always Loved
In Consolations II, author and poet David Whyte delves into the deeper meanings and nuances of everyday, overused words—such as anxiety, anguish, freedom, shame, and guilt—to uncover their roots and help us better understand ourselves and our lived experiences. “Burnout,” Whyte writes, “is diagnosed by exhaustion, often caused by… assuming goals that actually belong to other people and which I have stolen to my detriment.” To pursue “the shallow rewards of false goals or false people” is to evoke a disproportionate balance to the realms of life. To fill the holes in your heart, to live a rich and fulfilling life of accomplishment and tranquillity, begins when you abandon the path that deceivingly led you to this perilous state and return to what is “precious to me… what I have loved and have always loved since I was a child.”
