The Four Burners Theory | How to Manage Your Ambitions
What is The Four Burners Theory ?
The Four Burners Theory offers a simple way to think about your life roles when it comes to Family, Friends, Health, and Work. We only have 24 hours in a day with a limited amount of time and energy to spend on these key areas of our lives. Luckily, there’s an alternative approach to work-life balance within the four burners theory, that could also help you to achieve better productivity, health, happiness and satisfaction. Here’s how it works.
Imagine that your life is represented by a stove with four burners on it. Each burner symbolizes one major quadrant of your life.
- The first burner represents your Family.
- The second burner is your Friends.
- The third burner is your Health.
- The fourth burner is your Work.
So far, so good. There’s only one problem. According to the original New Yorker article first mentioning the concept:
“In order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful you have to cut off two.”
In other words, if say you wanted to become very successful at your work or career, you’d have to sacrifice a combination of either your time with friends, family or health. If you look back into your past to recall a personal major achievement in your academics, sports, career and so on, you probably sacrificed one or more of the major areas of your life.
So which burners do you turn up? Which ones down? Do you feel drawn to the idea of cranking one up all the way?
Really tough questions !
Approach to the Four Burners Theory
However, the implications of the four burners theory may seem extreme, since it suggests that you’d have to cut off key areas of your life. This doesn’t necessarily have to be the case in reality.
Here’s a better way to think about the four burners theory.
Imagine you’re a juggler who could only hold two balls in your hands at any given point in time. Each ball represents a key area of your life.
No matter how many balls you’d like to juggle, you can’t hold any new balls without tossing one of the other balls up in the air temporarily.
A bunch of different scenarios could play out. For example, if you always hold unto one ball, you’d be limited to how many balls you can juggle, so you could release more.
Likewise, some people would be able to juggle more balls than you or hold more balls at a time. You could also juggle with someone else or pay someone else to juggle for you.
The key point here is that we don’t have to completely cut off key areas of our lives, but, we should acknowledge that success and work-life balance can’t work together because of the limited time and energy available on a daily basis.
So, how to Manage Your Ambitions ?
Cultivating an healthy ambition is all about how you are managing and taking control of your four burners. Some tools that may help are :
Delegate activities
If you don’t have enough time for one of the burners, why not pay someone else to do it for you?
For example, if you’d usually spend time in the supermarket selecting and buying food on a weekly basis, you could choose an alternative online food delivery option to your home instead. This will save you time that can now be spent on other ‘burners’ in your life. Evidently, some things can’t be delegated i.e. exercising, but those that can will help you to free up a lot of time.
Defining what’s important
If we don’t know what is truly important to us versus what’s not, it’ll be much harder to say yes to doing what is important and no to things that appear to be urgent but aren’t important. While I can’t focus all my time on one burner without consequences, I can maximize the time I have for each one. The best way to start is by focusing on important things.
The Seasons of Life
A third way to manage your four burners is by breaking your life into seasons. What if, instead of searching for perfect work-life balance at all times, you divided your life into seasons that focused on a particular area? The importance of your burners may change throughout life. When you are in your 20s or 30s and you don’t have children, it can be easier to get to the gym and chase career ambitions. The health and work burners are on full blast. A few years later, you might start a family and suddenly the health burner dips down to a slow simmer while your family burner gets more gas. Another decade passes and you might revive relationships with old friends or pursue that business idea you had been putting off.
Embrace Constraints
Embrace your limitations. The question to ask yourself is, “Assuming a particular set of constraints, how can I be as effective as possible?” For example
- Assuming I can only write for 20 minutes each day, how can I finish my book as fast as possible?
- Assuming I can only exercise for 4 hours each week, how can I get in the best shape possible?
This line of questioning pulls your focus toward something positive (getting the most out of what you have available) rather than something negative (worrying about never having enough time).
Final takeaways
The Four Burners Theory is one of many ways to frame life’s endless tradeoffs. Whichever lens you pick to look at the problem, you’ll have to keep changing both it and the resulting compromises that allow you to make progress. The necessity of sacrifice for success is one of the downsides of work-life balance, which underestimates the high volume of hours required on a daily basis to become a top performer in any field.
Every choice has a cost!!
Read also : The OODA Loop | Decision Making Model ( https://thebrightdelights.com/the-ooda-loop-decision-making-model/ )