I’m a great believer in finding a happy healthy balance in all areas of life. It’s a variation on ‘moderation in everything’. You can apply it to all the areas of your life we’ll be focusing on later, from exercise to parenthood, studying to retirement. You are a complex, complicated, wonderful human being with all that that entails, so you need to find space to enjoy every aspect of your life. Too much of anything leaves not enough room for something else.
It’s not just about how you allocate your time of course. You need emotional balance, a balanced outlook, a balance of interests. So this section is about how to avoid being overly focused on any aspect of your life, at the expense of other areas. In fact, your time is the part that can matter least – if you’re happy spending every free hour reading or jogging or playing video games, and it isn’t negatively affecting anyone else, that’s fine. What matters is that you’re broadly content with your life. Of course there will be bad days – even bad months or occasionally years – but a good balanced approach will help you to cope with the bad times and get full value from the good times.
These Rules, about your underlying attitude to life, really underpin all the Rules that come later, and will give you the foundation you need to be as healthy and content as possible.