“Run Your Family Like a Business” read a Wall Street Journal article a friend once sent me, half as a joke. Fun aside, I did agree there were business management insights that could be applied to personal life and relationships, from goal setting to communication. Indeed, I’ve noticed there’s a significant overlap between the self-development and the entrepreneurial communities. People who devote thought and time to developing themselves also tend to start and run their own businesses. As self-directed, independent people, they tend to respond poorly to the bureaucratic barriers and arbitrary rules that plague many employees’ lives. Their solution is to create the same autonomy, choice, and freedom for themselves in their professional lives as they seek in their personal lives.

Cross-pollination also works the other way though: principles of business practice get imported into personal life. In myself, I’ve noticed an effect that might be called the manager frame. The principal values of this frame are productivity and efficiency. Under the influence of my self-help readings, I began to behave as if my life were an enterprise that needed managing. It was broken up into discrete tasks, such as exercising, reading, searching for work, and seeing friends. I began to view each of these areas of life through the lens of maintenance, upkeep, and development. I enthusiastically immersed myself in properly managing these things, investing in them so as to get the most efficient return. I depressedly realized that I was living life by managing it.

Although this approach certainly helped me to streamline my activities, I also think it was dangerously unbalanced. I became accustomed to viewing things in instrumental terms, as inputs to be processed as quickly as possible. I focused on achieving quantitative goals, such as pages or books read, rather than on enjoying the reading or thoroughly digesting it. I was, in a sense, caught up in my version of the ‘busy’ trap, using managerial work to keep myself occupied. The thing is that the manager has a keen eye that always finds some work to do, some loose ends to tie up, and could spend every moment correcting operational deficiencies. On its own, however, it was a stagnant, uninspired paradigm, breeding complacency without supplying direction.

A good manager is indispensable but has to be complemented with a visionary and an aesthete. Compared to the manager, both seem unproductive, which is why you need to take the manager’s hat off to give these sides of yourself the opportunity to express themselves. The visionary provides direction by clarifying values and setting goals that inform the manager’s operations. Crucially, the visionary also periodically brings about renewal, where direction is reassessed and new priorities are laid down. The aesthete is the one who makes a point of enjoying the fruits of labour. The manager’s well-oiled machine, put into the service of the visionary’s worthwhile ends, produces successful results and frees up money and time. The aesthete has to be there to appreciate it because left to his own devices the manager will just go back to checking inventory. To use an analogy I encountered in one of the podcasts I listen to, it’s important to let your inner Kumar out from the oppressive influence of your inner Harold. Harold is great at keeping your life flowing smoothly and taking care of routine responsibilities, but on his own he’s stifling, being both too pragmatic to dream and philosophize and too emotionally detached to honour feeling and sensation.