Success Quote by Thomas J. Leonard

"Balance is overrated" lands like a small act of heresy against the corporate wellness-industrial complex. Coming from Thomas J. Leonard, a businessman best known for helping mainstream coaching culture, it reads less like burnout bravado and more like a deliberate reframing of how change actually happens. Balance is the word organizations love because it sounds humane while quietly demanding you stay predictable. Leonard’s jab punctures that: the people who build things, pivot careers, or rewire habits rarely do it through gentle equilibrium. They do it through seasons of lopsided attention.

The intent isn’t anti-health so much as anti-fantasy. "Balance" often implies a stable, permanent arrangement, as if life were a neatly calibrated scale. Leonard’s subtext is that growth is inherently unbalanced: you overinvest, you neglect something temporarily, you tolerate discomfort, you accept trade-offs without dressing them up as lifestyle harmony. In entrepreneurial and self-improvement circles of the late 20th century, this is a familiar corrective to the poster-board ethic of "having it all". It’s permission to stop performing sanity and start choosing priorities.

There’s also a sneaky critique of moral accounting. People use "balance" to absolve themselves: one productive hour cancels one numbing hour; one gym session redeems a week of depletion. Leonard suggests the math is fake. The sharper truth is strategic imbalance: decide what matters now, commit harder than feels polite, and accept that your life will look messy while it works.