Success as Juggling
Howard-Stevenson's replacement for the word "balance." Balance implies a static state — he imagines a seal holding a ball on its nose, spinning. Juggling is dynamic: balls are always in motion, always needing attention in sequence, and the skill is in the coordination, not in holding everything still simultaneously.
How Juggling Works
Three rules from watching Cirque du Soleil jugglers that translate directly to life:
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Keep your eye on all the balls. If you only watch one ball, you drop the others. You must maintain peripheral awareness of all four dimensions even when focusing on one.
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When you touch something, give it energy. Nobody applauds a juggler who holds all the balls in hand. The moment you catch a ball, you give it direction and energy — then you release it. Holding on is not juggling.
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Calculate the arc. You throw knowing where the ball needs to land and when. The skill is in trusting the arc — throwing the ball before you've caught it back, confident it will return when you need it.
The Falling Ball
The most important ball is not the one at the top of the arc or the one in your hand. It's the one you're about to drop.
In life, the falling ball is whichever dimension has gone longest without attention. The natural temptation is to keep working on the dimension that's going well (the one at the top). The skill is redirecting attention to the one that's about to hit the floor.
Rubber vs. Glass Balls
Not all balls behave the same when dropped:
- Career tends to be rubber. It bounces. A setback, a gap year, a pivot — careers are more resilient than they feel in the moment.
- Family can shatter. Miss a period of a child's development, let a marriage erode, neglect a parent — some of those losses don't recover. The glass ball demands attention before it hits the floor.
The asymmetry means career setbacks are recoverable in ways family ruptures often aren't. This should inform which ball you treat as the falling one.
Why "Balance" Is the Wrong Word
Balance suggests equal weight on all sides simultaneously. It implies a steady state. Life doesn't offer that. The four dimensions naturally expand and contract: early career, achievement dominates; mid-career, significance rises; later, legacy builds; happiness must be present throughout or it calcifies.
"Balance" also suggests the goal is to hold everything in place. Juggling says the goal is to keep everything moving — release, trust, redirect, catch, release again.
The Connection to Enough
Juggling is only possible when you have a sense-of-enough on each dimension. If you can never put achievement down because you've never defined enough, you can't throw the ball. You hold it. Holding it means the others fall. Enough is what allows the release.
Connections
- four-dimensions-of-success — the four balls being juggled
- sense-of-enough — what allows you to throw a ball instead of holding it
- spiral-of-life — the spiral is the pattern juggling produces over time: each dimension touched repeatedly, growing with each pass
- personal-projects — Brian Little's concept of idiogenic core pursuits overlaps with the glass balls: the projects that define you are the ones you can't let drop