Are You a Balanced or Extreme Type of Person?

It kinda struck me just now, although I’ve always known deep down, that I’m not a very balanced person.

I’m a to the hilt type of person. When I do something, I becoming fully involved in it.  I learn everything I can about it. It consumes most of my time and energy.

For instance, my mother still tells me stories of how when I was a child I had a time when I would wake up on Saturday mornings and spend the entire day in my room playing with K’nex. I didn’t care about anything else, except building with my construction toys.

And I’ve had a few people ask when I was going to write more posts for this blog, and my answer has been that I am currently working on another blog project that I was tired of talking about and decided to start. My energy has been completely involved with this new project from brainstorming and general plans for how the blog will go, to custom designing the theme and writing around 15 posts to start the blog off with.

So that epiphany got me thinking about which is better to be.

Extreme Person

An extreme person is typically, from my experiences, driven by great passion for whatever it is he is doing, but there is also that ‘burn out’ that tends to happen. I don’t know if ‘burn out’ is the best term, usually I just become more passionate for something else, its not as if I loath the project I previously had.

That extreme personality though causes everything else to suffer. I become so consumed with one project, all the others go neglected.

Balanced Person

On the other hand, the balanced person’s foibles are simply inverse to the extreme person’s fortes. A balanced person isn’t driven with passion. Their day, week, whatever is a routine. They spend 1 hour a day doing x and 2 hours doing y. They don’t have those nights where they stay up so late working on a project they love that their mind becomes mush and they can’t string together coherent thoughts due to fatigue.

A balanced person also can adhere so much to their routine that most of their projects are simply maintained and no worthwhile progress is had on any of them.

Final Thoughts

My writing skills have probably gone down in the past month of nothingness, but I can also smack out a decent Wordpress theme in no time after completing 3 in that same time period.

I can definitely see how becoming a more balanced person can help me. One thing I’d like to do but haven’t gotten very far on is to take an hour or two each week and go through some Photoshop tutorial to sharpen those skills. But I guess if I truly became passionate about learning Photoshop then I can make up those lost hours by powering through Photoshop books and tutorials in a passion-driven month.

Although, I better get some balancing skills by the time I start to become a real freelancer juggling multiple clients at once.

What’s your opinion? Are you a more balanced or extreme person? Any advice on why I should become more balanced or remain as I am?

  • Jimmy P
    October 23, 2008 @ 12:04 pm
    1

    I can certainly relate to your “extreme person” mentality, as I’m more or less the same way.

    However, I think you may have unfairly spun a negative connotation on the balanced person.

    I’m not sure we can say that the balanced person works without passion, nor that they make no real progress. I’ve always looked at the balanced person as having some built-in checks about when to stop that I lack, or the ability to prioritize things better, or remove one’s self from a situation to deal with another.

    I’m sure you’ve had things you’ve needed to do or focus on, but since your passion for something else is so great you shrug them off for your current priority. I do it all the time, and I wish I didn’t. I hate that I can’t focus on something that’s important because I can’t get my mind to stop working on my latest pet project.

    Anyway, I don’t mean to take away from a very good and very relateable post. Lots of good things have been produced (and maybe can only be produced) with the passion that you’re describing. Keep in mind though, that incremental progress can still yield good results too. We all know that sometimes removing yourself from something for a bit can yield better results when you jump back in. How many times has your passion kept you grinding away at something, when really you should have stepped back, looked at the big picture, and taken a different approach because you were too close to see correctly?

    Maybe the real trick is balancing when to be balanced and when to be extreme?

    Reply
  • Jeremy
    October 23, 2008 @ 1:26 pm
    2

    @Jimmy – Excellent comment. You’re right I probably didn’t give the balanced person a fair shake.

    Especially if you’d like to make a Tortoise and Hare metaphor out of the balanced and extreme personalities. Slow and steady wins the race.

    I can also relate to having my passion for something clouding my problem solving ability. I get so caught up in my work and trying to solve a problem that I don’t take the time to step and rationally think about the problem.

    I can spend 2 hours trying to solve something to give up, go to bed, and then solve the problem in 10 minutes the next morning.

    I think your last line is the best advice around about this subject. Knowing when you control the pace of your day/project and when to just go all out. Well said.

    Reply

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