How to Make Work-Life Balance Work: Nigel Marsh (Transcript)

Nigel Marsh – TED Talk TRANSCRIPT

What I thought I would do is I would start with a simple request.

I’d like all of you to pause for a moment, you wretched weaklings, and take stock of your miserable existence.

Now that was the advice that St. Benedict gave his rather startled followers in the fifth century. It was the advice that I decided to follow myself when I turned 40.

Up until that moment, I had been that classic corporate warrior — I was eating too much, I was drinking too much, I was working too hard and I was neglecting the family.

And I decided that I would try and turn my life around. In particular, I decided I would try to address the thorny issue of work-life balance.

So I stepped back from the workforce, and I spent a year at home with my wife and four young children. But all I learned about work-life balance from that year was that I found it quite easy to balance work and life when I didn’t have any work. Not a very useful skill, especially when the money runs out.

So I went back to work, and I’ve spent these seven years since struggling with, studying and writing about work-life balance. And I have four observations I’d like to share with you today.

The first is: if society is to make any progress on this issue, we need an honest debate. But the trouble is so many people talk so much rubbish about work-life balance.

All the discussions about flexi-time or dress-down Fridays or paternity leave only serve to mask the core issue, which is that certain job and career choices are fundamentally incompatible with being meaningfully engaged on a day-to-day basis with a young family.

Now the first step in solving any problem is acknowledging the reality of the situation you’re in. And the reality of the society that we’re in is there are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet, screaming desperation, where they work long, hard hours at jobs they hate to enable them to buy things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like.

It’s my contention that going to work on Friday in jeans and T-shirt isn’t really getting to the nub of the issue.

The second observation I’d like to make is we need to face the truth that governments and corporations aren’t going to solve this issue for us. We should stop looking outside. It’s up to us as individuals to take control and responsibility for the type of lives that we want to lead.

If you don’t design your life, someone else will design it for you, and you may just not like their idea of balance. It’s particularly important — this isn’t on the World Wide Web, is it? I’m about to get fired — it’s particularly important that you never put the quality of your life in the hands of a commercial corporation.

Now I’m not talking here just about the bad companies — the “abattoirs of the human soul,” as I call them. I’m talking about all companies.

Because commercial companies are inherently designed to get as much out of you as they can get away with. It’s in their nature; it’s in their DNA; it’s what they do — even the good, well-intentioned companies.

On the one hand, putting childcare facilities in the workplace is wonderful and enlightened. On the other hand, it’s a nightmare — it just means you spend more time at the bloody office.

We have to be responsible for setting and enforcing the boundaries that we want in our life.

The third observation is we have to be careful with the timeframe that we choose upon which to judge our balance.