Physical activity was a huge part of John Paul II’s life. He wasn’t about to give it up as pope. He knew he needed it in order to have the strength and energy to meet the many demands placed upon him. Accordingly, he horrified some at the Vatican when he would jog through the Vatican gardens or sneak out with his closest aide, then Monsignor, now Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, to go skiing. He also raised a few eyebrows when he had a pool built at the papal summer residence. When some questioned the cost of the pool, he famously replied, “It’s cheaper than another conclave.”
Later, after the pool was built, he noticed that he was the only one using it. He urged the staff and the Swiss Guards to take advantage of it as well. When one of his aides objected that this would disrupt the pope’s swimming schedule, John Paul just laughed and said that having lived with university students for so many years, he thought he could fend for himself.
One of the pope’s other great loves was music. In order to continue enjoying live performances, he began inviting performers to come to him. He also launched the Vatican Christmas concert series, which brought pop artists from around the world to the Vatican to raise money for charity. No matter who was performing, John Paul always made a point to greet the artist personally.
The pope worked equally hard to maintain his friendships and relationships. One of his greatest joys as a priest and bishop had always been working closely with his students, and so once he became pope he began a summer school of sorts at Castel Gandolfo. Every year, scholars would be invited to these small conferences, and the pope would personally lead the discussions.
He also went out of his way to receive his friends and former classmates when they were in Rome. He was particularly fond of his schoolmates from Wadowice, the village where he grew up. When it came time for their school reunion, they sent him the invitation, but with little hope that he could come. John Paul, however, surprised them. Not by coming to Poland—he knew that would be too difficult to arrange—but instead by offering to host the reunion in his own dining room at the Vatican.
In all that, John Paul showed me that he knew what so many of us don’t: True success can’t be had without balance. Like a runner who needs to use both his legs to reach the finish line, we all need to attend to both our work life and personal life if we want to attain our goals. We need to find the balance between work and play, quarterly goals and time spent with friends and family. We need to relax, to cultivate interests and passions outside the office. If we don’t, something inside us withers and dies. We may make millions, but without balance, we will still be failures.
All Work and No Play
During my time at the Vatican, I saw how well John Paul II balanced the demands of his papacy with the people and activities he most enjoyed. I saw it, and I admired it. But after I left his service, I did a terrible job of imitating it. For nearly fifteen years, I focused on work to the exclusion of almost everything else. The more responsibility I was given at work, the more I neglected my personal life and interests. Family birthdays came and went. Anniversaries, vacations, even the holidays—I gave them all up for work. Slowly, I began to burn out.
I lost my energy and enthusiasm. I lost the reason for why I was doing what I was doing. I also started to lose friends and lose contact with people for whom I cared deeply. By the time the rug was pulled out from underneath me in 2000, I had forgotten how to have fun. I also had become deeply lonely.
Stealing from Peter to Pay Paul
I, however, was among the lucky ones. I didn’t, for example, lose my wife, which happens to be a fairly common fate in the upper echelons of the corporate world. Not long ago, I was at a conference where one of the speakers was a professor from (and graduate of) Harvard Business School. During his talk, he lamented how at every class reunion, more and more of his classmates are divorced. He also explained how every year he challenges his students by presenting three questions they’ll need to answer as they enter the business world: (1) How can I be sure I’ll be happy in my career? (2) How can I ensure that my relationships become an enduring source of happiness? And (3) How can I stay out of jail?
That professor knows what his students don’t. Answering those questions isn’t as easy as they think it will be. It requires all that we’ve talked about thus far—an understanding of vocation, prayer, ethics, the right use of free will, attentiveness to the future and to the moment, knowledge of your team, and the ability to act rightly. But it also requires being able to walk away from the office, away from work and stress and deadlines, and enjoy the rest of what life has to offer. That’s difficult. Attaining balance is difficult. Occasionally you run across people who invest too much time in personal matters and can’t hold up the work end of the equation. But more often than not, it’s the personal side that suffers. Relationships, interests, a prayer life—all that gets sacrificed on the altar of short term profit.
But the truth of the matter is, you can’t steal from Peter to pay Paul. The less happy you are at home, the less effective you are at work. Likewise, the less rest you get at night and on weekends, the less efficient you are during the workweek. An inability to find balance in life costs you professionally, as well as personally. It’s like that runner we talked about earlier. He can try hopping to the finish line if he wants, but he’s not going to win any races that way. The only way to cross the finish line first is to run on both legs. That’s what balance is.
So, how do you find it?
Living Balance in Everyday Life
All Things in Moderation
You’ve heard it before, and it’s true: All things in moderation. That’s the first key to living a balanced life. When applied to work and your personal life it means pretty much the same thing as when it was applied to diet. Consider eating in moderation: should you eat carrots or cookies? The two aren’t mutually exclusive. Over the long-term, most people can’t eat only one. You need both carrots and cookies in a balanced diet, and you need both work and a personal life in order to become the person God created you to be. They are intended, in fact, to be complementary, each building on the other and enriching the other.
John Paul understood that. That’s why he made time each day for the essentials—prayer, sleep, meals, work, and exercise. He never skipped any of those things. That’s also why his week and his month always included scheduled time for recreation—time for reading, listening to music, and staying in touch with friends. It’s why annually there were always vacations—extended periods of relaxation where he could do what he loved the most with those whom he cared about the most. John Paul II knew that only by making time for everything in his schedule could he do what was expected of him as pope and do it well.
In the sixth century, Saint Benedict said pretty much the same thing when he was writing out the rule for his monks. “Let all things be done with moderation”22 he writes. According to Benedict, everything must be given its due, but only its due. There should be something of everything and not too much of anything. Because he was focused on the life of religious men, the balance he was trying to help them find was between work and prayer. That balance was necessary, he believed, because each activity supported and illuminated the other. We need prayer, he said, in order to understand why we’re working, just as we need work to help us achieve the order and harmony that sustains our prayer lives. Likewise, he believed that the monks needed to learn to approach prayer with the same determination with which they approached work, recognizing that perfection in anything requires practice.
Benedict also had strong opinions about the rest of what went on in a monk’s life. Eating, drinking, sleeping, relaxing, hospitality—all of that was accounted for in his rule. Each of those activities, he asserted, was important to a well-ordered life, as long as they were enjoyed in moderation. To indulge in any at the expense of the others,was asking for trouble.
Benedict’s wisdom works just as well for executives in the twenty-first century as it did for monks in the sixth century. In order to be
successful, you need to see your work and personal life as two sides of the same coin, as mutually supportive, not mutually exclusive realities. You also need to make sure you schedule time for all that goes into a healthy, happy, productive life. That includes the essential activities for healthy bodies—eating, sleeping, and exercising—as well as the essential activities for healthy souls—spending time with family and friends, praying, reading, and watching the occasional movie or basketball game.
When you approach life with the attitude of “all things in moderation,” you avoid the anxiety that comes with feeling like you’ll never be able to do something you care about. You also avoid overindulging in something that you don’t often get to do. You don’t sleep too much on the weekends, because you get plenty of sleep during the week. You don’t eat too much at dinner, because you made sure to eat breakfast and lunch. You don’t spend every night working late at the office, because you know you’ll be back there tomorrow and the budget you’re working on isn’t going anywhere.
Basically, the “all things in moderation” approach forces you to step back from the urgent concerns of each moment and get a bird’s eye view of life. It helps you distinguish between the important and the urgent, to recognize what really needs to be done now and what can wait until later. It’s an attitude that stems panic and gives you the courage to face problems, not run from them. It also helps you live in the moment.
Moments of Joy
When you have the weight of other people’s futures on your shoulders, it’s easy to spend much of your time focused on the future. That’s natural, but not always helpful. Many of the CEOs I know, myself included, spend so much time worrying about the future, that we’re not always able to enjoy the present. We miss out on what God is offering us right now—small moments of beauty, joy, and peace—because we’re worried about problems that haven’t yet revealed themselves. We are, in the biblical sense, borrowing trouble from tomorrow.
John Paul II didn’t live that way. He didn’t spend so much time worrying about tomorrow that he forgot to enjoy the day. He certainly didn’t wait until he checked off everything on his “to-do” list to relax and do the things he loved. He did them as he went along, and in that, he found the grace, wisdom, and strength necessary for facing the very real problems that the future did hold.
In that, he was imitating God the Father. God rejoices, Jesus tells us, when one lost sheep, one prodigal son, one precious coin is found. He doesn’t wait until all the sheep come home or all problems of the world have been solved. God, in fact, doesn’t think about the future at all. That’s because to God there is no future. There is no past. He exists in eternity, outside of time. He lives in the eternal now. He rejoices in the eternal now. He invites us to rejoice along with him in the eternal now.
That doesn’t mean that God’s just going with the flow and not attending to any plan. If anyone knows how to attend to a plan, it’s God. He’s the original master planner. But now is part of the plan. For us, it’s the only part of the plan we can do anything about. We can’t change the past. We can’t control the future. All we can do is respond to the present challenges and present graces.
In his book, The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis does a great job of synthesizing this idea. There, the book’s narrator, the demon Screwtape, explains to a lesser demon, Wormwood, the following truth about God and men:
He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself and to the point in time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity…Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead…He does not want men to give the future their hearts, to place their treasure in it.23
“For the present is the point at which time touches eternity.” That line is worth repeating. What Lewis essentially says is that it’s in the present moment that God asks you to be with him, to love him, to rejoice with him. All the little moments of beauty and delight that come your way each and every day—newly fallen snow, reading in bed with your children, sitting by the fireside with your spouse, or eating ice cream on a hot summer’s day—are invitations from him to do just that. If you miss those invitations, you miss him.
That’s another reason why cultivating a daily prayer life is so important. The more you learn to hear God’s voice, the more clearly you see those invitations for what they are and the more readily you accept them. The more you accept the momentary graces and joys God offers you, the less susceptible you are to anxiety, insecurity, and all the other fears that can enslave you. The more you relish the joys of the moment, the freer you are.
Giving Thanks
Gratitude and joy go hand in hand. The more grateful you are, the more joy you experience. Likewise, the more grateful you are for what you have, the less likely you are to ignore those gifts or take them for granted. In other words, when you truly appreciate your life, you’re not going to spend the whole of it at the office. Like most things, however, gratitude takes practice. Just as you have to train your will to choose and act rightly, you also have to train your soul to be thankful. You have to work at it. That requires a few things.
First, it requires an active prayer life. You have to know that you’re grateful to Someone. You have to know Whom to thank. Second, it requires humility. You have to acknowledge your own littleness and helplessness in the grand scheme of things. You have to see that even the things you seem to have accomplished on your own are really the work of God, who gave you your abilities and natural virtues in the first place. Third, you have to recognize that your trials and sorrows are also gifts. God has permitted you to experience them because in his all-loving, all-knowing way, he sees how they will help bring you real and lasting joy.
Once you recognize those things, make a daily habit of thanking God for all the blessings he’s bestowed upon you. One way to do this is to begin your prayers each morning with an Act of Thanksgiving. You can also do this after Communion or at the end of the day. I’ve personally found it helpful to make a list of blessings. It’s never anything complicated. Sometimes it’s nothing more than a brief list of words in a notebook. Other times, I focus on a certain area of my life—work, home, etc.—or on a specific person—a boss or employee. Just by sitting down with pen and paper and challenging myself to come up with twenty or thirty things for which I’m grateful, I’ve trained myself to recognize how blessed I am. Once I’ve taken the time to write out twenty or thirty different gifts God has given me, it’s hard to stay negative about anyone or anything.
This also makes it hard to give in to anxiety about the future. The more grateful you become, the more you recognize that you are not the master of your universe. Try as you might, you can’t control the future, and no matter how hard you work or how much you sacrifice, you can’t control what will eventually come of your work and sacrifices. That knowledge is tremendously freeing. It reminds you to focus on what you can control, and it helps you entrust the future and all your anxieties about it to God. You do what you can, and then head home to throw snowballs with the kids, leaving the rest to God.
If you don’t know that an all-loving, all-powerful, ever-merciful God is ultimately the one calling the shots, there’s no way you can find balance. There’s no way you can walk away from the office and make time to pray and play. You’re too busy trying to save the world or the company on your own. But when you know he’s there, when you know there’s someone far wiser and more capable than you, someone in whom you can place your trust, you can relax. You can find balance. You can make it to the finish line.24
***
Of all the lessons I learned from John Paul II, enjoying life and finding balance has been the hardest. It takes a lot of planning and a lot of focus. It also, for me, requires an annual trip to the circus. That too was something I learned from the pope.
In 1982, well before I arrived at the Vatican, the Great Moscow Circus was on a four-month tour of Italy when it re
ceived an unexpected invitation: His Holiness, Pope John Paul II, wanted the circus to perform for him in St. Peter’s Square.
This request was surprising on many levels. First, only months before, John Paul had nearly been killed by an assassin’s bullet. His convalescence was a long one, and papal audiences had been put on hold indefinitely, pending the pope’s full recovery.
Second, this was the Great Moscow Circus, the pride of the Soviet Union—the atheist, communist Soviet Union. No Soviet delegation had ever so much as stepped foot into the Vatican. Regardless of whether or not the government granted them permission to perform, the request was unprecedented.
Finally, this was the pope asking, the man tasked with shepherding hundreds of millions of souls. Surely he had more important things to do than watch bears dance in St. Peter’s Square?
John Paul II, however, saw things differently. Not only did he know that it was through laughter and shared enjoyment of a thing, not diplomatic negotiations and summits, that relationships were built, but he also knew that he needed laughter and enjoyment. He needed those things in order to be a good pope. Only through finding the right balance of work and relaxation, could he be effective in his work.
The Pope & the CEO Page 13