Dear Alexa,
The Irish poet Yeats said, "The intellect (才智出众者) of man is forced to choose: perfection of the life, or of the work." He was wrong. You could have both.
You're noticing that time spent on academic learning is time not spent with friends. That time cost will get worse as you get older, rounded with working, achievement-hunting or family responsibilities. Many achievers have woken up at age 50 or 70, only to wonder where all of their friends and soft memories were.
It is too easy to forget why we are trying to gain money and knowledge. It is for a life well-lived instead of money and knowledge themselves. Smart people make this stupid mistake all the time, in search for the means to an end so much that they forget the end altogether.
The trick is to see your day, not your life, as the place where you carry out your priorities. Every day there will be one more task you could do. Teach yourself to stop even though there's more to do. Think of things you have missed out in your life and promise yourself you won't do them again: "I won't cancel on a friend's birthday" or "I won't speak to my family as though I'm the lead."
Giving slightly less time to work doesn't mean achieving less. I have been lucky to know some seriously achieving people in my life from Rhodes scholars to Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize winners. None of them are in their office at 11 p.m. flapping papers. If they were, they would not have such energy for their greatness.
You don't have to choose between life and work since making time for one helps the other. But you have to make the time since how you plan your day is how you plan your life.
Eleanor Gordon-Smith
