Speaker 1: Today's question comes from Joseph in New Mexico. Joseph writes, I'm 27 years old, engaged to be married, and we have a young son. I own an IT consulting business that last year made $130,000 in profit after paying all expenses, including my salary. I'm grateful for all the opportunities that helped my career and financial growth, but I feel stuck. I've been putting more thought into what I want to do with my life, and I realize I'm sacrificing a lot of time with my family. I want to slow down, regroup, and regain focus on my life, but that feels impossible with all my work responsibilities. The other day I saw how happy my son was when I was able to clear my schedule and pick him up from school. It truly made me question a lot of my past decisions. I want to change, but I'm afraid that means I wasted a lot of time growing something just to shut it down. Is there such thing as a work-life balance? What do you think, Dave? I don't think I'm qualified to answer this. Well, I'll go backwards. No, there's no such thing as a work-life balance. It's not real. It's a myth. It doesn't exist. There are seasons, and there are seasons of madness and wildness. Right now, we are on the road. I'm writing another book. I am all over the place. Back in September, or maybe it was August, my wife and I sat down and mapped out the next four months. We knew it was going to be bananas. We have built in touch points all through that time because we knew. When the kids ask for stuff, yeah, it stinks. It's also part of it. Because of this season, it's going to allow for a different season on the other side of this thing. No, there's no such thing as work-life balance. There's being honest about what season we're in. Sometimes you wear a coat because it's winter. Other times you wear shorts because it's the summer. Same thing when it comes to your life. I could tell you right now, Joseph, if your kid was really happy to see you, if you picked him up every single day, in about a week and a half, he'd be really tired of seeing you. That's just the way that works, man. Those moments are special or great.

Speaker 2: Your dog's happy to see you every night because they don't even know you've been gone. What we don't have in this email, or however it came in, is the number of hours you're putting in and what your long-term goal is and those kinds of things. In general, the idea that I don't want to work much so I can play with my kid is not going to work well with you long-term. In general. No one in the equation is going to respect or like you at the end of that story. They're just not. In general. I'm talking like, I want to work 10 hours a week and I want to interfere with the teacher at the elementary school because I'm there so much. Whatever. What I think I'm hearing is that you don't see any end of this in sight. I don't know how many hours you're working. If you're working 40 to 60 hours and you're running a business and you're paying yourself a salary plus 130, well, welcome to the real world. Right. Oh, well. That's exactly right. And if your kid is doing a Christmas play, you can go. You can just decide I'm going to book around that and you can go. You can decide that. But do you pick them up every day from school? Probably not. Oh, well. You're running a business. You work. You're earning money for your family. It's not bad. You're not a workaholic and you don't have issues. There's nothing like that going on. And you're not burning out. You're doing fine. You got a good career. The only parallel I know is this. When I was 32 years old, we started this show, I was working 16-hour days, ridiculous hours during that time for about two years. My kids were little. My wife, if you sat her down today, would still say something snarky about that period of time, about her being a single mom. During that time, even though she's snarky about it and harbors some bitterness, her life turned out okay, I can tell you that, because we, for a period of time, turned the heat up and got the stove going. You know, we got the thing cooking. And so then later on, the next year, if there was a prom, we did not book live events around the prom date. There was a... I coached my son's ice hockey. So that means on Saturdays and every night, whatever, I was down there coaching him when he's seven, eight, nine years old, that kind of stuff. For years, I coached his ice hockey team. And so we were there. I mean, we would go to the lake, and I taught them all to do stuff behind the boat, drug them around on the tubes, throw them off, and do mean dad stuff to them and all that stuff. So we have all of those memories, too, but we also have a thing. I did not take 12 weeks off as the father that was working when my children were born. I took 12 hours off. And it never occurred to me, had I taken more than 12 hours off, my wife, who grew up in the country where hard work is taught, would have said, what the bleep are you doing here? Get out. You need to get out of here. You're a kid. You need to get your butt back to work. So what I hear in this is- But my point is, I've had balance, come and go here or there. And then there's times it's winter, and you have to turn the heat up. You got to go. And right now, you know, you got the thing running. It sounds like, I don't know why you need to be burning it 180 degrees at boil over. Just turn the heat down a little bit and work 40, 60 hours, 50 hours, whatever. And then another week, you know, work 30.

Speaker 1: I don't think this is about his kid. I see this over and over, where somebody's 27 to 35. They've gone all in on a particular career. And they found out they had to work. They don't like it, or they have to work really hard, right? Or I thought this would just be super fun all the time. Whatever the thing is. And then you start looking around in your life for reasons to do something different. So what I would tell you, Joseph, is if you want to do something different, own it and do something different. Don't blame this on your kid. If you want to do something different and you don't like doing IT jobs, but you want to go be a police officer or a counselor, go be a police officer or a counselor. You don't need to justify it in a different way. Just do it in a safe, appropriate way.

Speaker 2: But here's the thing, expect. If you're going to avoid mediocrity in your life, in any area of your life, expect to pay a price. Absolutely. If you want to get your body in shape to run a marathon, expect to pay a price. Absolutely. If you want your marriage to be good, expect to concentrate on being unusually intentional about that, more so than your idiot friends on Instagram. That's right. Expect to work hard at a career over a long period of time before you make any freaking big money.

Speaker 1: That's right. And before you get to, ah, in this Instagram world we live in where if you just do this then you can have your private jet next year. It's just not real, man. It's not real.

Speaker 2: It's not real. If you want to work four days a week or you want to work from home, which means work part time and you want to do that, expect the different result. Expect a diminished return. Because here's the thing, mediocre, if that's your target, you're going to hit it.

Speaker 1: I had this epiphany, Dave. I did something I shouldn't have done way back in the day and I got online and looked what the top salaries were at the university I was working was. And I found out my boss made two or three times what I was making. And I was working 24-7, 365 and like a young idiot I got so indignant. And it wasn't two or three or four weeks later my boss calls me and says, hey, I want you to start coming to these meetings with me because I want to teach you how a CFO talks and how a president talks and how a board talks. And it was a gift. And it was about two or three weeks in, I follow him around to these meetings that I realized, oh crap, he earns that money. Yeah, he's like smarter than me and stuff. He's carrying the whole thing. Yeah, on his shoulders. Every decision that I make reflects on him. And he has to make the call on this and on this. And I realized, oh, there is no free ride, man. Those guys who put in the time and they make this money, it comes at a cost.

Speaker 2: It's not the five-minute repair. It's the 25 years to learn how to do the five-minute repair. That's the thing. So there's a price to be paid, sir. Somewhere in your life, that'll give you your work-life balance. That'll get you there. That's what our gazelle intensity that we teach is. For a short period of time, you just go crazy and get out of debt so that you can live without the stress of debt. That's right. It's a price to be paid. Or you can be YOLO and be paying payments the rest of your dadgum stupid life.