***What A Fly Can Teach You About Work/Life Balance

I was reading a fascinating article in The Economist the other day on how animals perceive time. The article was about research into critical flicker-fusion frequency (CFF), a fancy name for how fast an animal’s eyes can refresh an image and thereby process information. Humans refresh their eyes at roughly 60 hertz, or 60 times a second. Dogs refresh at 80 hertz, which is why dogs don’t like television — to them it looks like a series of still photographs, not moving pictures.

Which brings us to the fly. If you’ve ever tried to kill a fly with a newspaper you’ve probably been annoyed (and surprised) at how fast the fly moves to avoid the attack. The reason is, as researchers discovered, that flies have a CFF of 250 hertz. This means flies see incoming newspapers as slow moving objects that are easily avoided.

Why does this have to do with work/life balance?

A lot! It is clear from such studies that, in the natural world, a single event is perceived quite differently depending on the animal. And since all animals are in what’s called flow — working from their core, what makes them most successful — it means that different points of view are literally and biologically part of life.

Which brings me to you. Living in flow, from your core, means you are living as nature intended. Everything you do is for success. No animal, unless affected by outside forces, does anything that doesn’t make it 100% successful in what it is trying to accomplish.

Think about the common household dog or cat. While an owner might think he or she is the ‘master’, in reality the animal only does what makes it successful in its daily routine. Or to put it another way, the old saying is very true — you can take a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.

So how can all these animals with ‘different agendas’ all be successful? After all, they are all experiencing the same life event yet responding very differently.
The key is the animal kingdom isn’t generally susceptible to flow blockages, things that pervert flow one way or another. In the human world friends, family and society create flow blockages that ultimately impede your success. These represent the sole source of the majority of problems you encounter in life. Or to put it another way, these ‘human’ outside forces are telling you to approach the world from a single perspective without understanding what you’re about.

And that’s why I mentioned the different visual hertz various species have. You take a simple thing like watching television and you assume ‘everyone’ is having the same experience, the same perception. But, clearly that is not true at all. And this is how your flow works. Your flow, your core, gives you a foundation from which to approach anything in life, even watching television. Yet if you’re like most people flow blockages hinder your ability to approach life with full success in mind.

I used to be this way. I thought I was wrong or ‘doing it incorrectly’ when it came to things people accepted as being great. Some examples — Plasma televisions hurt my eyes, so I can’t watch them for more than a minute. I hate lobster, what most people consider God’s gift to dining. I think Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Vertigo is awful, yet it’s considered by many to be the best movie ever made.

I thought I was wrong for thinking these things, even to the point of believing there was something wrong with my body (after all, I must have a defect if I can’t watch plasma televisions). But then I understood my flow, and learned to work from my insides outward. Just like the fly. Or my dog.

You can apply this right now to your work and personal life. Knowing what YOU are about is crucial to any career advancement, any hope of true contentment and happiness in your life. You might not fit in with your current company. You might not like your new boss. You might not like working in the office at all. That’s okay, contrary to what others might tell you.

Your success is guaranteed if you follow the humble fly.