The World Is Full of Asymmetries

A simple exercise once a quarter: write out the key areas of your life and score each from 1 to 10. The imbalance and the room to grow become obvious.

How do you make your life more balanced?

There are a lot of asymmetries in this world. In plain language, a lot of uneven distribution of resources and a lot of skew.

Right now videos are going around where Hollywood stars in insanely expensive outfits arrive at an event with a $75,000 ticket price, followed by a run of footage from Syria, Ukraine and other places where people are suffering.

That’s a vivid example of asymmetry. Some people have a great deal of money, others have none at all.

Now that we understand what we’re talking about, let’s come down to the level of our own specific life.

There can be different asymmetries there too. One area of life is developed to an 8 out of 10, another only to a 2 out of 10.

For example, a woman has very good health (an 8), but a very bad relationship with her husband (a 2).

Or a person’s work is running at a 9 out of 10, while rest and new experiences are at a 3. Burnout and apathy start creeping in.

There can be many such examples, and in this kind of scoring what matters is exactly how we personally, subjectively feel about a given area of our life.

And to learn to notice these asymmetries, there’s a simple exercise. Once a quarter, take a pen and paper and simply write down the key areas of your life.

I have 10 of them, for example:

1. Spiritual growth
2. Dream and purpose
3. Health
4. Family
5. Work
6. Finances
7. Development
8. Environment and people around me
9. Creativity
10. Rest and new experiences

Then next to each area we put our own subjective score from 1 to 10 for how satisfied we are with that area right now.

We immediately see, in plain sight, where the room to grow is and which things in our life are currently out of balance.

Do you feel some skew or asymmetry in your own life? Do you work with it in any way?