Summary of the TED TALK - How to make the work-life balance work PDF

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How to make the work-life balance work...

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Summary of the TED TALK: How to make the work-life balance work

Nigel Marsh is the speaker of this talk. He discusses about the balance in everyone’s lives between work and everyday life. After an existence devoted to work, he decided to turn his living into something better at the age of forty. Therefore, he explains that he left his job in order to spend a year of his life with his wife and his four children, which he claimed to neglect. During this year spent at home, he came across four considerations.

The first one Nigel indicates is that we should be clear about stability in the world of the employment. There is so much chitchat about it and according to him, we need to be focused on our situation and we have to be aware of those ways of masking the problem, like dress-down on Fridays or flexitime, that aren’t just the right attitude of facing it. The one big truth is that workers are doing something they do not appreciate for people who they cannot stand.

The second one is about self-awareness. The speaker reports that society and associations are not helping workers facing their problems. They need to get responsible and to solve their issues with the strength of their individual competences. As a result, they will shape their life the way they like the most and they will not let governments or corporations do it for them.

In his third observation, Nigel suggests to be careful about the time we spend at work. We cannot take for granted the possibility of being caught in the trap of the so-called “no life” waiting for living it in our retirement when we probably have lose everything already. Nigel complains about finding a solution in-between the shortness of a day and the remote hope that there may be time, after a lifetime of work, in the retirement.

Nigel is a writer and he wrote a book, he spent seven years of his life writing about stability in the world of work. The fourth observation of Nigel comes from a question of a friend of him: his book proves to his friend that his life was going nowhere so he decided to join a gym. The observation Nigel makes is that we do not have to heal our body and care about being fit but we have to feed our mental and emotional part.

In conclusion, he shows his experience when he managed to spend time with his youngest son Harry after leaving work an hour before the end of the shift. They played in a park, they had pizza together and Nigel read a story to him before going to bed. After this, his son said to him it was the best day of his life. Nigel observes that he had done nothing to make it

the best for his son and he demonstrates to himself and to us that the small things make the difference. If we value these small things, we can change our views from short perspective to large ones like for those belonging to society. For example, we can turn the definition of success and achievement into something related to a life well lived, and not something connected to money and material things that will make you happy during your life but they will make you die alone....