This YouTube clip (Lex Fridman interviewing Ray Dalio) focuses on the role of work in a life’s journey and the concept of work–life balance. Dalio endorses making work and passion the same, emphasizes meaningful work plus meaningful relationships, and describes an "arc of life" with a midlife low in happiness (roughly ages 45–55) and a late-life peak (roughly ages 70–80). He also highlights that improving the productivity/quality of an hour of life reduces the work–life balance tension.
Questions this video answers
December 8, 2019.
Approximately ages 45 to 55.
Approximately ages 70 to 80.
Chapters
Much of your passions in life has been through something you might be able to call work. Alan Watts has this quote. He said that the real key to life, secret to life, is to be completely engaged with what you're doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play. So I'd like to ask, what is the role of work in your life's journey or in a life's journey? And what do you think about this modern idea of kind of separating work and work life balance?
I have a principle that I believe in is make your work and your passion the same thing.
Okay.
Okay. So that's similar. In other words, if you can make your work and your passion, it's just going to work out great. And then, of course, people have different purposes of work, and I don't want to be theoretical about that. People have to take care of their family. So money at a certain point is an important component of that work. So you look beyond that, what is the money going to get you and what are you trying to achieve? But the most important thing, I agree, is meaningful work and meaningful relationships. Like, if you can get into the thing that your mission that you're on and you are excited about that mission that you're on, and then you can do that with people who you have the meaningful relationships with. You have meaningful work and meaningful relationships. I mean, that is fabulous for most people.
And it seems that many people struggle to get there, not out of. Not necessarily because they're constrained by the fact that they have the financial constraints of having to provide for their family and so on. But it's. I mean, mo. You know, there's ideas out there that there needs to be a work life balance, which means that most people. We're going to return to the same things. Most doesn't mean optimal. But most people seem to not be doing their life's passion, not be. Not unifying work and passion. Why do you think that is?
Well, the work life balance, there's a life arc that you go through, starts at zero and ends somewhere in the vicinity of 80. And there is a phase. And you could look at the different degrees of happiness that happen in those phases. I can go through that if that was interesting. But we don't have time probably for it. But you get in the part of the life. That part of the life which has the lowest level of happiness is age 45 to 55. And because as you move into this second phase of your life now, the first phase of your life is when you're Learning, dependent on others. Second phase of your life is when you're working and others are dependent on you and you're trying to be successful. And in that phase of one's life, you encounter the work life balance challenge because you're trying to be successful at work and successful at parenting and successful and successful in all those things that take your demand and they get into that. And I understand that problem in the work life balance. The issue is primarily to know how to approach that. Okay, So I understand it's stressful, it produces stress, and it produces bad results. And it produces the lowest level of happiness in one's life. It's interesting, as you get later in life, the levels of happiness rise. And the highest level of happiness is between ages 70 and 80, which is interesting for other reasons. But in that spot I want. And that. And the key to work life balance is to realize and to learn how to get more out of an hour of life. Okay, because an hour of work, what people are thinking is that they have to make a choice between one thing and another. And of course they do, but they don't realize that if they develop the skill to get a lot more out of an hour, it's the equivalent of having many more hours in your life. And so that's why in the book Principles I try to go into, okay, now how can you get a lot more out of an hour? That allows you to get more life into your life and it reduces the work life balance.
And that's the primary struggle in that 35 to 45, if you could linger on that. So what are the ups and downs of life in terms of happiness in general and perhaps in your own life? When you look back at the moments.
The peaks, it's pretty pretty much same pattern. Early in one's life tends to be a very happy period all the way up. And 16 is like a really great happy. You know, I think, like myself, you start to get elements of freedom, you get your driver's license, whatever. But 16 is there junior year in high school quite often could be a stressful period to try to think about. The high school you go into college tends to be very happiness, generally speaking, freedom, and then freedom, friendships, all of that freedom is a big thing. And then 23 is a peak point kind of in happiness, that freedom. Then sequentially one has a great time, they date, they go out and so on. You find the love of your life, you begin to develop a family, and then with that, as time happens, you have more of your work life balance challenges that Come and your responsibilities. And then as you get there in that mid part of your life, that is the biggest struggle. Chances are you will crash in that period of time. You know, you'll have. You'll have your series of failures. That's that. That's when you go into the abyss. You learn. You hopefully learn from those mistakes. You have a metamorphosis. You come out, you change, you hopefully become better, and you take more responsibilities and so on. And then when you get to the later part, as you are starting to approach the transition and that late part of the second phase of your life, before you go into the third phase of your life, Second phase is you're working, trying to be successful. Third phase of your life is you want people to be successful without you. Okay, yes. You want your kids to be successful without you. Because when you're at that phase, they're at making their transition from the first phase to the second phase, and they're trying to be successful and you want them to be successful without you. And your parents are gone. And then you have freedom, and then you have freedom again. And that with that freedom. And then you have these. History is shown with this. You have friendships, you have perspective on life. You have different things. And that's one of the reasons that that later part of the life can be real. On average, actually, it's the highest. Very interesting thing. If there are surveys and say, how good do you look? And how good do you feel? And that's the highest survey. Now they're not looking the best and they're not feeling the best. Right. Maybe it's 35 that they're actually looking the best and feeling the best. But they rank the highest at that point. Survey results of being the highest in that 70 to 80 period of time, because it has to do with an attitude on life. Then you start to have grandkids. Oh, grandkids are great. And you start to experience that transition. Well, so that's what the arc of life pretty much looks like. And I'm experiencing it. You know, that's.
