Finding Peace: Manage Your Life Like a Mutual Fund
If you don't invest your life in what you really care for, your life will be wasted. You will not fly—you will just drag yourself through life.
Jaggi Vasudev (commonly known as Sadhguru)
If you have a retirement account or have ever invested in the stock market, it’s highly likely that you own or have owned at least one mutual fund. At a very basic level, a mutual fund is a collection of stocks from a select group of companies that are traded as a single investment vehicle. The benefit of mutual funds is that, unlike stocks, if one stock in the fund is performing poorly, it is likely that others are doing better. In other words, it provides balance and less risk because of diversification.
It struck me a few months ago that approaching life in a similar way could be beneficial. Every aspect of our lives is interconnected—mental health, physical health, career health, social health…it’s all connected to our total well-being. If you approach your life as a mutual fund or collection of things that matter the most to you, you’re more likely to have a balanced life. In the past, I have made the mistake of approaching my life sort of like individual stocks—looking at things in a disconnected manner. For example, focusing disproportionately on work while skipping workouts or meals. It all eventually caught up to me through overall lethargy and weight gain, and I had to spend quite some time getting myself back on track. I wasn’t managing my life holistically as a collective of values.
Now that I’m older, more aware of my body and even more unforgiving with my priorities, the unbalance I felt doesn’t really happen anymore and if it does, I know the signals that trigger me to get myself together pretty quickly.
So, the next time you’re feeling a sustained level of stress or anxiety, take a step back to reassess your life holistically. Are you investing proportionally into the things that really matter to you? Have you over-indexed your focus on one aspect of your life? If so, it may be worth taking some time to refocus and recalibrate so that you can hopefully find your peace again.
Aji