Nigel Marsh: How to make work-life balance work
What’s the story Nigel Marsh tells us in his introduction?
Marsh describes himself as the ‘classic corporate warrior’: working long hours, eating/drinking too much
and neglecting his family. When he turned 40, he decided to take time off from work (1 year). It turned
out that it is easy to balance life and work if you don’t have any work. But that cannot be the solution.
People need to earn a living. So, how does one balance life and work?
*Take stock of your miserable existence - Saint Benedict
*Turned his life around - the issue of work-life balance (1 yr at home with wife and children)
*Rubbish talk about balance work and life (flexitime, maternity leave)
Which four observations does Nigel Marsh discuss in his TED-talk on Work-life balance?
1. Certain jobs are incompatible with family.
Certain job and career choices are fundamentally incompatible with being meaningfully engaged on a
day-to-day basis with a young family. The reality of the society that we're in is there are thousands and
thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet, screaming desperation, where they work long,
hard hours at jobs they hate to enable them to buy things they don't need to impress people they don't
like. Society tries to show us that money and power leads to success (stereotypical view)
2. Governments and corporations aren't going to solve this issue for us.
Because commercial companies are inherently designed to get as much out of you as they can get away
with, we have to be responsible for setting and enforcing the boundaries that we want in our life.
(won’t be changed by companies & governments)
! Never put the quality of your life in the hands of a commercial company (they take as much as they can)
3. We have to be careful with the time frame that we choose upon which to judge our balance.
! Don’t think about retirement yet ! On the one hand, not every day of our life can be balanced, on the
other we shouldn’t fall into the trap of “I’ll have a life when I retire.” There’s got to be a middle way.
Elongate the timeframe in the way in which we balance our life.
! The small things matter, small investments manage your relations/can transform society
Careful with our timeframe to balance: be realistic, you can’t do it all, elongate it - fall into the trap
4. We need to approach balance in a balanced way
Marsh believes we need to attend all aspects of life: we should take care of our health, but also our
intellectual, emotional and spiritual needs and aspirations.
! Approach balance in a balanced way: attend all the areas (emotional, artistic side, …)
What point does Marsh make by telling the story of his afternoon with his son?
His point is the small things matter. Being more balanced doesn't mean dramatic upheaval in your life.
The small things can radically transform the quality of your relationships and your life.
What is his general conclusion?
Being balanced doesn’t mean great changes. If enough people make these small changes in their lives, it
can radically transform society: we can change society's definition of success away from the idea that the
person with the most money when he dies wins, to a more thoughtful and balanced definition of what a
life well lived looks like
Now, what’s your ideal view on a work-life balance?
, My ideal view on a work-life balance is about not being too strict each day. The idea that so many people
get a burn-out nowadays scares me. Going to work every day can be stressful, but if you like your job and
you like what you do, you come a long way. After your working hours, you should be able to put your
computer/phone off and enjoy time with your family. After all, that quality time is so important for your
mental well-being.
Lara Setrakian: Three ways to fix a broken news industry
Do you consider the news industry to be broken? In what way?
The news industry has a certain way of showing and hiding footage and information to influence the
population. The news industry wants to create a certain mindset about a crisis/war/certain countries and
cultures, even though the information they spread is incomplete or false.
What do you know about the Arab Spring? Look the information up if you don’t remember.
The Arab Spring was a series of anti-government protests, uprisings, and armed rebellions that spread
across much of the Arab world in the early 2010s. It began in response to corruption and economic
stagnation and was first started in Tunisia with the Tunisian Revolution. Later it spread throughout the
countries of the Arab League and its surroundings.
Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, Bahrain and Egypt, l Algeria, Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Oman
and Sudan, Djibouti, Mauritania, the Palestinian territories, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and the Western
Sahara. A major slogan of the demonstrators in the Arab world is
("the people want to bring down the regime").
When did Setrakian realise journalists were missing the story?
Setrakian is a foreign correspondent for ABC news. She realised that journalists were missing the story, it
was in the middle of the Iraq war in 2007. Very little of the conflicts in the Middle East were covered.
Networks dropped before the border, so there were stories from and about the people that went missing.
Around the time of the Iraq War, she saw the conflict in Syria and realised it became one of the forgotten
stories of the Arab Spring.
Afghanistan missed even more information
missing the species level issues, facing practical implications (lack of information)
War in Syria was one of the forgotten stories of the Arab spring
“Syria deeply” site, resource for professionals working on the war
Trying the fix the problem of the news, trust in media hit an all-time low we can fix the news
“Industrius optimist”
Which three ideas does Setrakian present to fix the broken news industry?
News needs to be built on deep domain knowledge
Working together with local journalists to uproot stories we would’ve otherwise missed in order
to gain some specialized reporting.
A hippocratic oath for news industry: do no harm, do not make it worse than it is
Journalists need to speak truth to power, and be responsible. Sensational reporting could do
serious harm to the general public.
Embrace complexity and make people think
Journalism is adult education: journalists need to get elbow deep in complexity and find ways to
