Multiplex Living - Life in a balance

Some years ago I was in an Anthropology class where the professor talked about two kinds of relationships that we can have: simplex relationships and multiplex relationships. He said that the key between these two was that reciprocal relationship was something that happened at a single strand; it was between two people. Multiplex relationships were when you had relationships with multiple people. The strength of a society is when people have multiplex relationships because then they are connected into more people’s lives. Anthropology being the study of man and humanity in terms of society, this was the key for strong societies; they were all dependent on multiplex relationships.


I thought that it was an interesting principle that I am sure has bearing for our lives in the business and corporate world as well. I was reading Thomas L. Friedman’s “The World is Flat” and in it he was talking about how as the world becomes flat, that opportunities are just galore, created all across and people all across the world are able to patch into different opportunities that they never thought were possible before. At one point he quotes Outlook Magazine that talked about this zippy generation of India. We’ve heard about the hippies in the 60s and the yuppies in the 80s and the Gen X and Gen Y. He calls this generation of Indians, Generation Z and says that they are the people who are products of the liberalization that came in the 90s and that they have a different mind set completely.

As I read that article, I thought that it was interesting in the sense that he’s talking about a different India, an India that has changed dramatically in the last 15 to 20 years. In the course of this book, he interviews Rajesh Rao, head of a small set up in Bangalore called Dhruva Interactive, who says that the key is in creating opportunities for yourself. Once you have that, hold onto that, or keep creating new opportunities for yourself where you can thrive. These are key things. It’s about efficiency, collaboration, competitiveness, being a player and staying sharp. He ends by saying that if you could get these qualities into your mix, you get to play in the game rather that just watching the game.

I think that in today’s scenario, that is so important. Either we are players or we just get to be spectators, and being spectators, isn’t as much fun as being a player. To do something worthwhile, we need to be on the playing field. Those 5 points are the key things that Rajesh Rao believes are important to be players in today’s growing economy. I think that really calls for a fast-paced world. That’s the kind of world we are in today, one in which you feel you are treading water a lot of time to keep your head barely above water because things are moving so fast, things are in flux so much of the time, it seems that control is so fleeting. So in this kind of world, how do you manage? How do you keep a sense of equilibrium? How do you have a sense of harmony in a world like this?

I came across an article by Carol Ring entitled ‘The Secret to Life of Balance: Stop Multi-tasking and Start Multi-Purposing’. The heading caught my attention. In it she says, “We end up torn between doing what we want to do (which usually involves personal activities) and end up doing what other people want us to do (which usually involves work activities). That’s the tension that we live in today, doing what you have to do in place of doing what you want to do. The key is to shift our thinking from multi-tasking to multi-purposing.” She defines multi-purposing: using one event, situation or activity for more than one purpose. It’s akin to the old saying ‘Kill two birds with one stone’. With multi-purposing, you’re scratching two items off your to-do list (one from your ‘have-to-do’ list and one from your ‘want-to-do’ list) if you are able to think in terms of purposing.

She goes on to say that the thing that happens most for us is that we compartmentalize things and we begin to have our activities in one particular column. When you multi-purpose, it involves training your brain to think a little differently. Rather than focus on the many things you have to do, you focus on those things that bring joy to your life and find ways to incorporate other tasks into those activities. So into the things that you have to do, bring the thing that you want to do as well and that, in a nutshell, is what she calls multi-purposing.

Then she gives 3-4 points on how one can do that.

1. Discover your personal values: what are the keys that in your life are inseparable from who you are? She says to write them down. It could be ‘inquisitiveness’, ‘integrity’, ‘respect for others’, ‘family’, ‘’community involvement’ and ‘honesty’. Write all of these down and then look at the activities that you engage in and see whether they fall into the have to-do-list or want-to-do list.
   
2. Get perspective on where you are spending your time: look at the things that you are doing and on a scale of 1 to 10, rate the things that you are doing. It could be in terms of your health, family, finances, friends, work, community and spiritual. Rate each of these things and they say, “In my work, here’s where I want to be, but here’s where I am”. Do a similar rating with your family. Once you have prioritized, you get a good idea of where you are really in the things that you are doing as opposed to the things you would like to do.
   
3. Build a library of experts: so often we don’t tap into the library of experts we have around us. There are people who can do or contribute that make the things that we are doing so easy without us have to do it. Build a good network of people.

If you can get those things going, then you can bring sanity and happiness into your fast-paced world. But the key is: you need to think in terms of integrating your ‘have-to-do’ with your ‘want-to-do’ activities. Then you will be in a better position to take stress and dissatisfaction out of your life.

That’s so true, isn’t it? We can get caught up in doing some things in a very linear way. We become myopic on the things that we are doing and we just keep pressing forward without really thinking that there is a level of dissatisfaction that is creeping in, because we see other areas that we would like to be inputting into, not happening. So, while we press on one of these areas, we are missing out on the balance in our lives. And lack of balance, of course, creates dissatisfaction. That brought me back to simplex and multiplex relationships; we need to have multiple things in our lives that bring equilibrium and harmony.

If we could just take a look into our lives and check and see, “Am I getting so single-minded and focused that I am doing it to the exclusion of things in my life that I would love to do? Am I living in a discontented way?” Then maybe you should take a step back and say, “I wonder whether I can do some multi-purposing here? Whatever, I might just bring a little bit more harmony into my life.

I want to close with this analogy. We have a maid at home who also helps in the office. She works hard, has 3 children, 2 sons and a daughter. Her husband doesn’t have a job and all his life has pursued things that have little or no value to the family. Being very poor, she works hard to get the children into school and give them a lifestyle. We’ve known them for 5 years now. The elder boy recently began to take on the mantle of a missing father and pushed hard at studying, started to do some of the work at the office and also taking the younger boy’s studies as well. The brother had failed consecutively for 3 years and left school. But the older boy got him back into school and that year he passed. 2 years back, he passed his 10th with 75% and got into a good college and started learning English with some proficiency. He also started working, bringing home a little more money. They work in the community as well, helping in different things and this year he passed his 12th with 70-80% and got admission into an Engineering College.

Wow! Looking at this boy’s life, it wasn’t just single-mindedly going for his studies. He was able to do a whole lot of things and keep his life in balance and brought so much joy to his mother and family. Looking after his little brother and sister who is a teenager, making sure she keeps the right company. Today he is at the threshold of getting into an Engineering College and furthering his life. Before he achieved anything, he had balance. And sometimes that’s our lives as well. Before we get up in a fast-paced world, we have the balance and then we lose it somewhere down the line.

Maybe today we need to look at our life in terms of the principle of simplex and multiplex relationships. “Do I have multiple things happening in my life that will bring harmony?” As we look at the world, we see that people who are single-minded; when that breaks, they lose hope, they lose any kind of drive to keep on living and that’s why we have so many disenchanted people, so many suicides. But when we have multiple things and multiplex relationships, then when one breaks the others sustain us.

So I wonder, all of you on this call today, how goes it in your life? Do you have a good sense of balance and harmony” or are you putting your everything, your strength, your energy and your knowledge into one area and losing out on a lot of other things you would like to do that are part of your value system?

In the Bible, God says in Matthew 6:25-34: “why do you worry so much? Look at the birds in the air; do they worry? No, they don’t and yet they do their work. They do what needs to be done. They build their nests, they reproduce, they feed their young, they do everything and yet they seem so carefree and that’s because they know God takes care of everything. God has built that into them.”

And God does the same for each of us. God looks after you and I think God would be pleased if you would bring harmony to your life and trust him to take you through, doing the things that you have to do and doing it well. Yet at the same time, doing the things that you would like to do that is a part of your bet for living. That’s my prayer for each one of you on this call today, that you would find purpose in the things that you are doing and balance in your life. I believe that will bring joy and contentment.

God Bless You All.