“Yes, breadth of experience is likely necessary and desirable when you’re young—after all, you have to go out there and discover what seems worth investing yourself in. But depth is where the gold is buried. And you have to stay committed to something and go deep to dig it up. That’s true in relationships, in a career, in building a great lifestyle—in everything.”
Mark Mason, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
Beyond the Quote (163/365)
With every major category in life—relationships, career, lifestyle—we must choose how to optimally invest our time. With time being our most precious resource, this is no easy task. How much time should we spend with our family versus our friends? With our current friends versus new friends? On our career versus our vacations? On tasks related to our career versus tasks that might expand our career options? On consuming things produced versus producing things to be consumed? On acquiring more versus minimizing and using less? What Manson points to above, however, is a fundamental insight that can help guide you in this effort.
Breadth and depth—these are the two variables that we must constantly play with throughout our lives in order to optimize how we spend our time. Breadth, is the size of your reach or the number of experiences you have—like the branches of a tree. Depth, is how deep those connections or experiences go—like a tree’s roots. If you think about it on a graph, with each increased number in breadth, the depth would decrease proportionally. This makes sense of course as if you spent all of your time with only one person, for example, the depth would be very high. But if you increased that number to two people, the depth would decrease accordingly—closer to half of the original depth. And if you increased it to three people then you would have to decrease the depth even further. And so on.
What you might notice as you imagine this graph, is that at some point, there will likely be a “sweet spot.” A spot at which the width and depth are optimally aligned so as to give you the ideal way to invest your time in that given category. You will find that at a certain point the number of people in your life and how deep you can take those relationships will be ideal. You will find that your talents, aptitudes, and abilities will eventually narrow to the ideal number of tasks within a career, job, and/or side hustle that will allow you to sustain an ideal level of success. You will also find that how much you travel versus how much you build within a certain territory has an ideal; how much you add to your belongings versus how much you use the belongings you have has an ideal; and even how much you consume what others produce versus how much you produce for others to consume has an ideal too. The journey—your task—is to find those “sweet spots.”
With this in mind, think about how this might help put your major categories in life into perspective. Let’s start with relationships. Are you trying to balance too many relationships where you constantly feel like you’re being pulled too thin? Or do you focus on too few people and feel lonely at times and like you could use more variety and breadth in your life? Or do you feel content with the number of relationships and how deep they go? Are you spending the appropriate amount of time with people based on their importance to you? Or do you feel like you’re spending too much time with certain people when you’d ultimately, rather be spending more time with other people? The wider the breadth, the shallower the depth.
These same types of questions follow for career and lifestyle too. Are you getting a general life education or are you getting a focused and intentional education that aligns with your aptitudes and abilities. Are you trying to do too many things at once or are you not doing enough with your time? Are you focusing too much on the number of followers—the width—of your social influence or are you more focused on the depth? Are you happy with where your roots are planted or have you not explored enough of the other soil in the world to be sure?
If you’re unsure about how you’re spending your time, this is a good practice. You might even draw out a graph for yourself and see how different categories appear when plotted out. What’s important is that you become aware of your time investments. Because once you’ve made the investment, you can’t change it or take it back—but, you can always adjust. So, looking at everything that will require an investment from you, how will you divvy up your time? How have you been divvying up your time? What might you change now to better align your time invested with where you want to be tomorrow?
Read Next: 15 No Bullsh*t Success Quotes from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
Don't Let the Motivation Stop There...!
Join our newsletter and get the BEST of what we post every week. Here's an example. Like? Sign up.
[amp-optin id=42297]