People who obsess about “work-life balance” are usually mediocre at both.
Obsessed people apply their obsession to everything, and just call it life.

Yesterday I turned 28, and I’ve been thinking about how much bad “balance” advice I got growing up.

A lot of recent grads ask me for career advice. My new opening line is:

“This is just my experience. You have to decide if it actually fits you.”

Because I’ve asked for/received an absurd amount of advice in my life and found:

Some of it was great
Some of it was fine
Some of it was terrible

One example I heard constantly before college, especially through lacrosse:

“There are three buckets: your sport, your education, and your social life. You can only be great at two. Pick which two.”

I heard that so many times I assumed it had to be true.
Looking back, I think it’s awful advice.

You can be exceptional at all three — you just have to be an exceptional person:

Learn to be brutally efficient
Be fully bought in to what you’re doing
Stop pretending everything is zero-sum

Efficiency creates time out of thin air.
Most people don’t have a time problem — they have a focus and intensity problem.

That same flawed thinking shows up later in life as “work–life balance”:

Work over here.
Life over there.
Carefully weighed. Never mixed.

That’s not how I experience it.

If you’re a genuinely passionate person, there is no clean line between work and life. There’s just life.

Some seasons are work-heavy.
Some are family-heavy.
Some are health-heavy.
The mix keeps changing.

So here’s my meta-advice at 28:

Never stop seeking advice
Never stop running your own self-audit
Expect what lights you up to change — new business, marriage, kids, causes, whatever

For my 29th year, my commitments are simple:

• Keep going hard at the work I love to do
• Start deliberately broadening where I spend time so my identity isn’t only work

If you’re wired like me, balance isn’t the goal.

The goal is to live fully engaged in the things that matter to you — and organized enough that you don’t have to drop one part of your life to be great at another.