Manage-Wise

When short-term needs clash with long-term goals

“It’s a trap. I’d love to focus more attention on my Big Dream, but I also have to keep food on the table. My job seems to swallow up every bit of my time and energy. At the end of the day I’ve barely got anything left over to give to my family, let alone my dream. How do I get around this?”

It’s a common dilemma. We have an exciting long-term goal, but there are pressing short-term needs that cannot be ignored. The two seem in conflict; meeting our short-term obligations and responsibilities is a full-time job that keeps the long-term dream forever ‘on hold.’

The way out of this dilemma begins with the realisation that life is not only like a box of chocolates (in the Forrest Gumpian sense of ‘never knowing what you’re going to get’). In many ways life is also like a glass of lemonade—sweetness is involved, and sourness is involved, and unless the two are in balance the whole thing’s going to leave a bad taste in your mouth.

In the absence of an aspirational field, life slips out of alignment—but also of balance. These two terms are often used interchangeably (as when the wheels on one’s cars are ‘out of alignment’ and thus need to be ‘rebalanced’), but strictly speaking refer to separate issues. The magnet brings randomly scattered iron filings into visible alignment; but if dense clumps of neatly aligned filings remain at one end of the field, with only sparse scatterings at the other, this field—while aligned—is not evenly balanced.

Unaligned life is waking hours divided between work that delivers little or no satisfaction, and leisure time largely spent consuming the output of other people’s dreams. What does the unbalanced life look like?

When most people refer to a need for greater balance in their lives, they are typically bemoaning the fact that the dividing line between work and leisure does not fall in the figurative ‘middle’—that is, too much of their time is devoted to work-related matters, too little to everything else. But in the context of dream-crafting, we can define this same imbalance in a different and more precise way: in the absence of any compelling long-term objective (Big Dream) to command their time and attention, most people invest almost all of their energies in pursuit of short-term objectives (paying the bills, keeping up with the Joneses). It is the dividing line between long-term focus and short-term focus that does not fall in the ‘middle’. It is this obsessive emphasis on forever-urgent short-term needs to the exclusion of any inspiring long-term vision that creates a suffocating sense of imbalance in so many lives.

The unbalanced life focusses on short-term needs to the exclusion of any long-term goal.

For the dream crafter armed with a vision of success, the challenge becomes one of moving the line closer to the middle—that is, of acheiving balance by redirecting some of the short-term focus toward the long-term goal.

“I intend to live forever,” goes the old joke. “So far so good.” The body requires oxygen to live; even a brief deprivation can be lethal. The body requires health to live long. Oxygen allows short-term survival, but on its own it does not confer long-term health. Anyone hoping to live long must meet immediate oxygen needs and long-term health needs as well. A balance must be struck.

Excerpt from ‘Dream Crafting’ by Paul Levesque and Art McNeil. Reproduced with permission © 2005, Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited.
E-mail: vishwanath_mum@tatamcgraw-hill.com