how to balance it all

Summary

early in entrepreneurship I asked a mentor how high performers balance athletic careers, businesses, and families. his answer was two words. they don’t. nobody does. that was the most useful thing anyone has ever told me about balance.

1. nobody has it all together. once you accept it you stop chasing the impossible and start picking what actually matters. the people who look balanced from the outside aren’t. they’re just deliberate about what they’re not doing.

2. content or complacent. quarterly I run this exercise. take the main areas of your life, finance, spiritual, health and fitness, relationships, business, personal. mark each one. content means satisfied with how it is right now. complacent means you know you should be giving it more and you aren’t. complacent is the trap.

3. then ask what each area looks like in ten years if you do nothing. and what it looks like in ten years if you give it daily attention. the gap between those two answers tells you where to spend the energy.

4. there is no such thing as priorities. there is one priority. for me it’s family. everything else is a goal. a priority is a litmus test for decisions. ask yourself what you’d actually pick if money were the trade. if it isn’t the thing you say it is, your real priority is something else. your calendar already knows.

5. Brian Dyson said it best. Gary Keller’s book The One Thing quotes it. life is five balls in the air, work, family, health, friends, spirit. work is a rubber ball. you drop it, it bounces back. the other four are glass. drop one and it scuffs, dents, or shatters and never comes back the same. know which is which before you optimize for the wrong one.

6. so how do you make progress in the goals when there’s only one priority. you execute in the margins. the margins are the time we hand to phones, feeds, waiting rooms, the 30 minute window before bed. in my book Killing Comfort I call the phone a pacifier, given to a baby to shut the baby up. adults today are drowning in pacifiers.

7. take the pacifier out of the margin and that’s where the spiritual reading, the quick workout, the planning, the morning pages go. balance isn’t a thing. extreme focus is. nobody has it all together. try harder.

Transcript

nobody has it all together

Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air. You name them Work, Family, Health, Friends, and Spirit, and you’re keeping all of these in the air. You will soon understand that Work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls, Family, Health, Friends, and Spirit, are made of glass.

If you drop one of these, they will irrevocably be scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged, or even shattered. They will never be the same. You must understand that and strive for balance in your life. The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business.

And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey. So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy.

Today I want to talk about balance or the lack of balance that being a really driven and ambitious person can create and maybe how to get a handle on that. This is something I find myself talking about with a lot of people very often. And I remember when I first started in entrepreneurship, I had a friend who’d been an entrepreneur for about 10 or 15 years, really call him a friend, call him a mentor.

And he was in the fitness industry at the time. And he, I remember seeing some really competitive athletes who also had successful businesses and they also had, you know, a wife and multiple kids and all these things. And I remember asking him, I was like, how did they balance all of that? Like, how do they balance it so well?

You know, and I was acting and coming from a place of, they do have it all together. They do have it all figured out. And his response was, they don’t, they don’t. And I remember it being just so matter of fact, and I was, you know, all my thoughts were like, well, how can you know that? Like maybe they do.

But now that I’ve been an entrepreneur for over 10 years, and I’ve seen a lot of entrepreneurs, I’ve coached a lot of entrepreneurs. And I’ve interviewed a lot of high performers, professional athletes. I have just seen the behind the scenes of a lot of areas and he was 100% right. They don’t, nobody has it all together.

And that was very comforting for me, because what I decided was, I just wasn’t going to do a lot. And I was only going to focus on a few things. And I was going to try and get really good at those things, as opposed to trying to be good at everything, because that just isn’t going to happen, it’s not going to work.

the content or complacent exercise

And one exercise I run people through really on a quarterly basis at this point is my content or complacent exercise. And we’ll do it real quick. But I think it’s important to know where you’re at in a lot of different areas. In the different areas that I have listed, feel free to add, take away whatever, but different areas of your life are finance, your spiritual life, health and fitness as one category, relationships, business, and personal life.

And business, if you have a job could be professional, so just professional life. Now I like for people to sit down for three to five minutes doesn’t take a long time. And you’re just going to mark each one of these areas as content or complacent. So if you’re content, you are happy with things the way they are currently.

Content does not mean there is no room for improvement. Content means as of right now, you are satisfied with how things are. Complacent is different. Complacent is you know you need to devote more time and attention to a specific area. You have not given enough effort or you have stopped trying to improve in this area.

And I think sometimes just knowing the difference between content or complacent. Complacent is I’m getting behind, I’m not focusing even though I want to be focusing in this area. And content, just the fact that the word exists means that we can take a break and ease off on needing to constantly strive for more or better.

What if you get to a place financially where you’re content? Maybe your ability to earn more money has kind of capped out and you know you got to work on some other stuff but you’re good right now. You’re saving what you want to save, you’re giving what you want to give, you’ve got enough to go around.

And so you’re like you know what, this finance is not going to be a major part of what I’m pushing for right now. I’m not complacent but I’m content with how things are if I can maintain what I’m doing. So then you can move to something else. Sometimes you can’t drive forward in all of these areas.

Some of them are going to have to be content and some of them are going to have to be okay I’m pushing forward because I’m really lacking, I’m behind here. Now the second part of this exercise is to answer a question in each area. So first, in every single one of those areas you just do a quick assessment.

there is only one priority

Are you content or are you complacent? And then the second part is what does this area of your life look like if you do nothing? And I like for people to forecast that out for 10 years. If you did nothing with your finances, if you did nothing with your spiritual life, you did nothing in your relationships or your health or fitness, what does it look like in 10 years?

And then the next one is, the next question to answer is, what does this area of your life look like if you give it some attention daily over the next decade? Where would you be? This is one of my favorite exercises and it’s a great self-assessment and helps you realize where you need to be putting time because there’s one thing that I know that no one else is really willing to say is, there’s only one priority.

We like to use priority as plural. I have my priorities. There are not priorities in your life. There is a priority and then there’s everything else. You can have one priority and multiple goals, but in my opinion, there’s one priority. For me, that’s my family. That is my priority. So everything else is, it’s something I’m chasing.

I have goals in these other areas, but my number one priority is my family. Being there for my kids, being there for my wife, and it doesn’t mean I don’t work, right? That’s a big part of being able to have a family and support them in the way that I need to. It’s all intermingled, but when push comes to shove, I’m not choosing the extra work.

I’m choosing the extra time with them. And that’s what a priority is. A priority is a litmus test for your decisions. So what is your actual priority? I’ll never forget, I was in a meeting in the military amongst a lot of different military leaders and my boss got up and he mentioned how family was his priority.

And it truly was. The dude left, the second he was able to, he left work to go spend time with his family. You could tell very much that he prioritized his family above all else. And I remember all the other leaders saying, yeah, family is our priority as well. And he called everyone out on it right then and there.

He was like, he’s like, a lot of you say that, but you don’t mean it. He’s like, I mean it when I say that they are my priority. And his schedule showed that. And a lot of them, they were not that way. They could say that. Everyone says their family is a priority, but when you look at their calendar and their actions and things that they’re doing, family is not a priority.

glass balls and rubber balls

If you really want to know what your priorities are, just look at your calendar. Where are you spending your time? That’s your priority. Now one thing I want to read in line with that is the glass and rubber balls analogy by Brian Dyson. It’s also in the one thing book by Gary Keller. So imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air.

You name them work, family, health, friends, and spirit, and you’re keeping all of these in the air. You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls, family, health, friends, and spirit are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will irrevocably be scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged, or even shattered.

They will never be the same. You must understand that and strive for balance in your life. And you have to know in your life what’s a glass ball, what’s a rubber ball. Because if I make less money in my business this month, cool, we can do something new next month. If I have a horrible month in the relationship with my wife and I do things that just piss her off and make her upset and I don’t take care of her, maybe I violate her trust, something like that.

If I were to do those things, you don’t just come back from that. That’s how humans work. That’s how relationships work. You can forgive people. You can move on, but there’s always going to be that part, the scuff that’s there. There are certain areas that you can’t afford to make mistakes. So know what your glass balls are and know what your rubber balls are because there’s only one priority and you have to actually know what that is and then you can set goals everywhere else.

And so what I think that you should focus on or how to do it is if we only have one priority, how do we get all these other things done? How can we do, how can I focus on health and fitness and spiritual and all these other things if I’m saying my family or relationships are the number one thing that is the priority?

I think we’re a lost art of getting things done is the ability to execute in the margins. You need to learn how to execute in the margins. The margins are all, just to call it out, like straight up what it is, whenever you’re using your phone, that’s a margin in your life. When you’re sitting in a waiting room, when you’re at your house and you have 30 minutes, you know, before the kids go to bed and you’re on your phone.

To be honest, most people today, whenever you’re on your phone, that’s margin time. That’s time that you could be focusing on these other things. You could be planning what you’re going to want to do with your finances. You could fit in a quick workout in your living room. You could do all of these things, but we have lost our margins in life because we fill it with something that has to entertain us or occupy our brain.

execute in the margins

In my book, Killing Comfort, I call them pacifiers. We fill our lives with pacifiers. A pacifier is given to a baby to shut the baby up. Bottom line, there’s no utility for a pacifier beyond that. It gives them something to do so they’ll be quiet. It’s not productive. It doesn’t teach them anything.

It’s not helpful. It’s just there. How many pacifiers are in your life right now that are filling up your margin time? That’s when you could be doing these other things that are not your priorities, but they’re your goals. It’s not your priority, should I say, but it’s your goal. If you need to focus on all these other areas, you need to do that in the margin.

You feel like you don’t have time. You do have time. The time is in the margin, filling the margin with pacifiers. That’s how you balance your life. You can only have one priority and you need to make it an actual priority. Determine what your glass ball is and then know what your rubber balls are, things that can bounce back.

Decide where you’re content and where you’re complacent. Wherever you’re complacent, start to move forward in those areas. Where and when do we do that? If you already are time poor, you do that in the margin. You eliminate the pacifier. You do that in the margin times. How you move forward in all the areas that you want to move forward in, and you’re always going to be focusing on one priority.

That’s always a focus. All these other areas when you need to move them from complacent to content or, Hey, I’m moving forward and making progress. You do that in the margin time and that’s how it works. There’s no balance. There’s just extreme focus in really knowing what you want and trying not to pretend like everyone else has it all together.

And no one does. We’re all just trying as hard as we can. Some people aren’t. If you’re listening to this podcast, I’d like to think that you are here to try hard and that’s the best I know. That’s the best I understand it and that’s the best advice I can give for trying to maintain what looks like balance and living a life you can be proud of and be happy with.

Thank you. Thank you.