There is something meta about having margins to write about margins, and that’s how we got here. Bringing an article to life (or doing anything worthwhile for that matter) has a lot of prerequisites: an idea, desire to do it, a plan, prioritization, willpower .. and the list goes on. Most of these have been covered widely in self-help literature. I’ll save your time and delve into important component that is hardly ever mentioned: time and space to do the thing: a.k.a margins. Its tricky because on the surface it looks passive, counter-intuitive, some might even say lazy. Reserving more than a week taking over a week to write less than 1000 words doesn’t win productivity awards but it may be exactly what you need. Stick around and I’ll show you why.
You can always tell when people are operating with thin margins: they always have somewhere else to be, have little empathy and are almost always stressed. I know that because most I have been one of them. My mind was always two steps ahead because living in the moment felt like a waste of time. For some reason (that makes no sense in hindsight) living life to the fullest meant every waking hour had to be accounted for. Its easy to fall into this trap because there is always a to-do that should have been done yesterday, greener pastures elsewhere, a script to be executed and the reality is for some situations it works really well. Strong emphasis on some; on a time crunch, when the path to prosperity is crystal clear executing the script makes total sense. Otherwise, it is bound to fail, and for good reason: entropy. The universe is designed to maximize chaos and so by definition any script that relies on order is bound to fail. Depending on your margins, this can be either really stressful or deeply engaging; you want it to be the latter. Lets talk about high margins.
High margin people are easy to spot. For starters, they live like they have all the time in the world. They are optimistic (sometimes annoyingly so) that everything will work out in the end. They think long term and how they can be of service to others. They don’t mind taking a step back to bring everyone onboard. For them, the script is merely a suggestion because there a multiple ways to reach a desired outcome and they know the desired outcome is not set in stone. They treat hiccups as opportunities for conversation, experimentation and growth. As a result they are creative, collaborative and generally more fun to be around. I want to be them when I grow up.
When I heard of the concept of life margins in Justin Jackson’s interview in a podcast, it gave me a lot to think about. We know that good margins are good for business but we rarely think about it when designing our lives. Its a pity because margins are good for everyone. The most obvious way to create margins is to plan for less, add in buffer and invite other people on board. In other words, forget all you’ve read about productivity and take the scenic route. There are no guarantees on the outcome except that you’ll definetly have a good time.
