I subscribed to this axiom or meme (depending on your inclination) for the longest time. I will however say that a better meme or axiom is needed to define how we achieve work life balance, which in itself is anachronistic.

One new way to look at it comes from a very nuanced perspective provided by a former Googler marketing executive and entrepreneur who is pursuing a PhD in neuroscience from Oxford University. Anne-Laure Le Cunff started a subscription based community called NESS Labs to discuss how we could unleash our creativity. Her take on it is to tap into and craft our inherent “curiosity” to find the various things that draw out our curiosity and thus fuel our interest and energy.

A second way to look at it is the way provided by a famous essay that I read as a sophomore which led to my career choices, which was initially to teach and do research. Bertrand Russell suggests that the source of lasting happiness is to reflect upon our legacy that would survive past our limited life span. He suggests that science offers a field which builds upon original contributions to advancing human knowledge that modern scientific methodology has created a curated mechanism to incorporate contributions into generally accepted consensus.

I surmised that while I could learn and grasp abstract math like concepts, when it comes to original contributions, I’ll have to toil like a laborer planting rice seedlings in a field. In fact that has been the nature of my journey in a career that began as a Chemistry teacher to what I do today.

A second point about Russell’s advice is that I saw a curated publication as a metric of how I am doing. That assessment has now changed and I don’t need a metric as I feel it is sufficient to earn my keep so to speak by contributing to increasing the understanding of any domain where I am engaged in problem solving.

Problem solving and curiosity are both inherent qualities we all possess and use. I think Viktor Frankl provides a great idea that we inherently seek meaning and if we grok this through engaging in work the boundary between work and play blurs.

Interested in NESSLabs ? Check out

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