In 2002, Nigel Marsh suddenly skidded from being a high-flying advertising executive, running the Australian operations of a United Kingdom agency, to an at-home dad, after being fired. The native of Plymouth, England, was terrified. He was 40 years old, unemployed, 25,000 kilometres from home, with four kids under the age of five and a wife who didn’t work outside the home. “I basically thought my life was over,” he recalls in an interview.
He had always ignored talk of work-life balance, wondering what the fuss was all about. He was a classic corporate warrior, eating too much, drinking too much, and neglecting his family. But with all life and no work, he decided “to turn the telescope around and properly reengage with my family and properly contribute to the domestic chores. It was exhilarating, challenging and life affirming.”
Yet he still had qualms. After all, he had been a success – a big success – in the world of work. Now, he felt marooned. Even the chance to re-engage with family seemed cheapened by the situation. “I found it easy to balance work and life when I didn’t have any work,” he jokes. But in retrospect he feels it was the most successful year of his life. It saved his marriage. He connected with his kids “in a permanently glorious way.” He gave up alcohol, got fit, lost 40 pounds, and most surprising of all wrote a bestseller, Fat, Forty and Fired that has been translated into numerous languages and is being made into a film.
“The main lesson would be how sad it is that so often it takes a redundancy [job loss], bereavement, divorce or injury to get us to pause and reflect upon our lives and how we are living. The simple fact is that life is about human relationships. Having a successful career but a lonely old age full of regrets is not the way to go, yet so many fall into that pattern,” he says.
In 2010, he gave a lecture in Sydney, Australia as part of the TED Talk series on how to make work-life balance work, offering four key points for us to consider. It starts with the need for society to have an honest dialogue on the issue. “But the trouble is, so many people talk rubbish about work-life balance,” he says, because as a species humans are hard wired to be attracted to easy answers. He argues that all the discussions about innovations in the workplace such as flextime or dress-down Fridays mask the core issue: Certain job and career choices are fundamentally incompatible with being meaningfully engaged on a day-to-day basis with a young family.
To solve a problem, you must acknowledge reality. And he says the reality is that “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.” Getting the chance to go to work on Friday in jeans and a T-shirt may make work friendlier, but it doesn’t address the fundamental issue.
His second point is that we need to face the truth that governments and corporations won’t solve this issue for us. “Stop looking outside. It’s up to us as individuals to take control and responsibility for the types of lives we want to lead,” he says. “If you don’t design your life someone else will design it for you, and you may just not like their idea of balance.”
