Work Life Balance

Count money, man, money back riches.

I'm trying to talk, trying to talk to my beast blood.

What's up gang?

Welcome back to another episode of The Grindcast.

Get ready as a new day.

And today, by request of DM on my IG,

we're going to talk about work, life, balance.

Work, life, balance today.

Man, that's a subject that so many, I think, want to hear.

And I'm going to tell you, I think

it all depends on where you're currently at in life,

and especially where you're currently at in business.

So what I mean by that balancing implies, like, weight.

When I think of balancing, it's like to balance your weight.

To balance a scale, you need to have the same weight

on both sides.

That's how you balance a scale.

And so it's difficult to have equal time spent on business,

and equal time spent on personal life.

So you're rarely going to achieve exact balance, 50, 50,

balance.

And so the first thing I'll say is if you're young,

and you're early in your career, I think

you should forget about balance.

I think the way to balance yourself

is to make sure you just don't go into a depression,

and you try your best to develop yourself

and work on yourself, find your balance mentally, physically,

and spiritually, working to improve yourself.

But I think it's pay now and play later.

And so let me just stay here for a minute for the young folks,

people just getting started building something.

You really haven't anybody that you look up to,

whether it's an athlete or a musician,

or somebody in business, there's nobody

winning the Olympics that's not obsessed.

There's nobody winning the Super Bowl

at quarterback that's not obsessed.

You know, recently you see this stuff about Tom Brady.

I mean, he's obsessed with the game.

That's why he got all the rings.

That's why he's been in the Super Bowl so many times.

Early in my career, fresh out of college,

I grounded my ass off.

That meant I missed nights out with my friends, dinners,

birthday parties, people told me I was working too hard.

You're young, enjoy yourself.

You have all your time to work and living through it now,

about to be 40.

With a wife and three kids of my own,

four kids raised out of our home, I can tell you,

I'm not perfect, but I've lived through this

to give some advice on the topic.

Now, understand I'm not talking to folks that want to be average.

This is not the average cast.

That's a different station you got to find.

This is the grind cast.

And so this is for people coming to obtain greatness

in the next level of life.

This is not where you're coming for mediocre in life.

And so if you're on here and you're looking for mediocre,

you're probably not going to understand

what we're talking about here.

And so this is for greatness.

And so understand like my advice

for people that are in their 20s

is these are the best years,

especially like men, the first four or five years out of college

or out of high school.

These are the best years of your life to put the work in,

put the grind in.

This is the time where on a whim,

if an opportunity opens up and you need to move,

you can move.

You don't have any kids typically,

not a lot of, maybe you don't have kids yet,

maybe you didn't have a family that you've started yet,

maybe.

And so this is an opportunity where you don't have

anything holding you back that you have to focus

all of your time and energy on.

It's just choices of things that you want

to focus your time and energy on now.

But in your 20s to me,

I'll just tell you my personal life experience

is in my 20s and people that came up with me

would second this.

I didn't have many distractions that I focused on.

I didn't go out to the clubs much sometimes,

but very rarely.

Weekends I worked, Saturdays I worked,

first couple of years, Sundays I worked.

I tried to find an edge to work as many days

as I possibly could when other people weren't working.

Hobbies and all that,

people know I'm obsessed with Jiu-Jitsu now.

But I've been doing it for about 12 years.

So I started at 27, I started in business at 22.

Five years of the grind.

Before I started to say,

all right, I'm gonna take on a little bit of a hobby

for myself on the side.

It's not wasn't in my first year, why?

My first year I gave everything that I had

to the business, to building a business, everything I had.

I moved multiple times, I traveled,

people talk about traveling,

I hear people complaining about driving to the office.

I drove to Columbus from Cleveland all the time

as a normal thing.

And I would make our nine o'clock in the morning meeting

from Cleveland, eight o'clock AM meetings from Cleveland.

We built businesses working on Sundays.

Once you grind long enough and hard enough,

you'll create an imbalance

where you're able to spend your time,

however that you want to spend your time.

And so the way that I would want you people to look at it

is when you're just getting a business started

or you're just getting started in your 20s

right out of college or high school,

this is the time to make the sacrifices.

The price is never gonna be cheaper than it is right now.

It's only gonna get more expensive.

10 years from today,

it's gonna cost you more than it cost you right now.

If there's ever a time to take a risk on yourself

and bet on yourself, it's now.

I watch so many kids and their family members and friends

talk them out of taking a risk coming out of college.

Oh, no, don't do that.

Don't just go take this sake, go do this sake.

This is the time to do something off the beaten path

and take a risk a little bit because you can recover.

You ain't got three babies to feed.

You ain't got a wife to feed.

A lot of times you're staying at home with your parents.

You got four roommates.

This is the time to grind.

Speaking of four roommates,

my first couple of years in business,

I was making tons of money.

I made a million in my first 36 months in the business,

but I had roommates.

My wife that I live with now that I've been with for 14 years,

she live with me and four other guys.

When we first started to save money,

not because we were broke,

but to keep expenses low,

save money, reinvest as much as we possibly could

into the business.

So those young folks out there,

this is your time.

Don't buy into the hype.

DBTH, don't believe the hype.

Don't believe the BS

about you got all this time in the world

and you need to have fun and all that.

No, no, I think you need to pay now

so you can play later.

I want you to play,

but you're either gonna play now too much

and then you're gonna have to pay the price later.

And by the time you pay the price,

you're a little bit drained,

you've given a bunch of your energy.

Maybe you got a girl, maybe you got a man,

maybe you got a family, maybe.

Now the price is a little bit higher.

Now if you got to work a lot harder,

you got to put in the work

you're missing time with your babies.

You're missing time with your kids,

you're missing,

we're building a business here.

Well, I don't,

I never am I telling my people that I want them

to miss their son's baseball game

or basketball game or football game

or daughter's cheerleading or I'm never telling them that.

But what I'm telling our people to do

is to pay the price now

so you don't have to pay the price later.

Now if you're already have a family

and you're at the start of a career,

you're in the building phase,

it becomes more about rhythm than balance.

You get into a rhythm.

What do you mean by rhythm Simon?

The analogy that I saw one time

was a man juggling these small balls

that he was throwing in the air.

And so what happened is if you juggle

you got to have one ball in the air

and I'm just going to say we're juggling three balls.

You got one ball in each one of your hands

and then you got a ball in the air.

And so when you put it up,

the key is to not hold on to any one of those balls too long

because if you hang on to one ball too long

without throwing the other one up,

then the other one's going to drop to the floor.

And so the juggling of it is family work,

whatever else you got going on.

If you hold on too long to the family ball

and you don't get your job done,

then things start to crash.

If you hang on too long to the job ball

and you don't get the family done,

the things start to crash.

And so you just got, you get into this rhythm

of just boom, don't keep it in the air too long.

We might have to grind it out for a few days

but don't keep it in the air too long.

It's this rhythm that you get into.

And then you learn to blend as much as you possibly can

things together.

So it's blend, not balance, it's blending.

What do you mean by blend?

Man, can I have my wife or significant other come with me

to an event?

Can I have people over to my house?

Can we multi-task things?

Can I bring the kids around at the same time

I'm doing other things?

How can we blend things?

And then I think you got to maximize your fricking time.

This is why I just stress the people,

why I think it's important if you're on the grind

and if you're on the hustle,

especially if you got to try to find balance

is to get up early.

You only got so many hours in a day.

And so for me, if I don't get up at 5.5.30,

something's going down.

Either it's myself getting neglected

or it's my family getting neglected

or it's the business getting neglected.

I haven't been able to consistently,

and it's the 17 years in the game now.

Take out two or three hours all the time,

once in a while I do,

but two, three hours in the middle of the day

to go work out.

You know, even if it's an hour workout,

hour and a half workout,

how long does it take you to get ready, drive there?

Get showered up, drive back.

That's three hours.

Well, in the middle of the day,

I should be giving that to my team.

I should be building business with that.

I should have been taking care of myself.

That's selfish, self things.

First, that's my personal opinion.

You got to schedule everything if you want

some balance in your life.

You got to schedule everything.

Priorities down.

Plan them meticulously.

We got 168 hours in a week.

Work, family, health, sleep.

Everything should be planned out in schedule to the tee.

If you look at my schedule in my calendar,

it'll have these things down.

It'll have family dinners.

It'll have date night with my wife.

It'll have specific things going on with my kids.

It'll have the exact time that I'm training, showering,

working out, training Jiu Jitsu, driving,

while I'm driving, I'm taking calls.

It'll have everything broken down to the tee.

If you don't have it on your schedule,

broken down to the tee, you're going to waste time.

There should be a beginning and there should be an end.

What time do you start?

What time do you end?

And plan things and put it in your calendar.

You know, we say now, if it's not in the calendar,

don't count.

There's, once the gun goes off of the day,

you have to be able to look at your calendar

and just execute.

This is not a time to plan.

So today, when I woke up, all I had to do

is look at the calendar and say,

what does it say I'm supposed to do right now?

And then what you do is you set alarms so you don't go past.

So if you're supposed to stop at 10.30,

put an alarm on your phone for 10.25 that rings,

that stops you at 10.30.

So you have alarms keeping you organized.

You have your schedule keeping you organized.

And what I love about planning your schedule

is it allows you without emotion

to plan, what do I want to do with my time?

So I'm looking at next week,

what do I want to do with my time?

Plan it out to the T

because I think a lot of people that say they don't have time

are just making excuses

or they're disorganized.

It's usually one of those two things.

They're just making excuses.

Are they're disorganized,

lacking discipline,

in structure is what happens.

Nobody has time.

How much time you got, Josh?

You got 168 hours.

They didn't say you know what you and Simon,

you guys weren't good as teenagers.

We're going to give a Lissa

198 hours.

You guys are getting 138 hours a week.

Nope, it's fair.

Everybody gets 168.

So listen, don't have time.

Josh don't have time.

I don't have time.

Nobody got any time.

Nobody has it.

If you're looking for time, you're not going to find any.

We're all giving 168.

And so now it's about what do you want to do with your time?

If you say you don't have time for your family,

but your golfing all the time, it doesn't make any sense.

If you say you don't have time to get stuff done at work,

but your plan video games all the time, all the time, it don't make sense.

If you're saying you don't have time for work or your family or whatever, but you're working

out in the middle of the day, three hours, it just don't make sense to me.

And so it's about prioritization, prioritizing your hours and your time for your life.

Your life is different than my life.

Your priorities are different to my part.

If you're listening to this, you're like, yep, wife don't have one of those.

Kids don't have none of those.

And your hours and your schedule and your priorities are a little bit different.

But what's not different is you get what you pay for.

That in my experience, the best way to achieve balance is to go all in and create that balance

that you want yourself but you got to create it.

You got to build it.

People think they're just earned, they're just deserved of all this work-life balance.

I think it's bullshit to be real with you.

I think if you reward yourself too soon with work-life balance too soon, you never really

get true balance that you want.

You never get the true autonomy of your schedule.

However, all the people that I know that have unbelievable schedules, from salary staff,

people, to commission people, to business owners, everybody that I know that has awesome

schedules, well you're like, man, how to hell.

Do you have that house, that car, and still got time to take vacations, have a second

home, travel, spend time with your family, go to your kids' games.

I mean, this looks amazing.

That's the life I want.

I want that life.

I don't want the life of the guy that's working six, seven days a week.

Well guess what?

If you don't want the life of the guy or the girl that works six, seven days a week and everybody

told her she was crazy, you don't get to have that other life.

You don't get to have that other life.

Well look now at me and they're like, oh man, I like to drive a Rolls Royce.

That's so sweet.

You and your wife going vacations all the time together.

You got date nights all the time.

Oh, you're a good dad.

You take your sons to the games and you're at all your daughter's events and you make time

for your mother.

Oh, this is so nice.

So sweet.

It's still, I'm still grinding.

First of all, you ask anybody around me.

It's grinding.

By an inch, I'm getting it all done.

By an inch, I'm getting it all done.

But I know we're not failing as a family.

I know we're not failing.

I know we're getting on a roll grades, at least in our marriage and with our family.

There's still a lot of work going on, but the schedule is better now than it was 10 years

ago.

The schedule is amazing now compared to what it was 15 years ago.

But it was those things that happened, the sacrifices that were made, the investments

that were made into the grind in the beginning years that pays off in the future.

Just like if you invested $100,000 20 years ago, and the rule of 72 is that money would

double seven years later, it would continue to double.

So let's just take it with me.

We're going to learn together.

So over 20 years, if you had 100,000, seven years later it would be worth 200,000.

All you'd have to do is get 10% interest, 10.2, 10% interest.

So 10% interest over those seven years that 100 would go to 200.

Then another seven years that would put us 14 years out, that 200 would go to 400.

Then another seven years that would put us at 21 years, that 400 would go to 800.

So it's almost a million dollars if all you did was put 100 in and didn't do nothing

else to it.

That's what happens with your time.

If you grind it out and you're putting in all this time, all these hours in the beginning,

what happens is the rule of compounding interest happens.

And when you're looking 10 years down the road, 15 years down the road, you've created

so much momentum from all this money that you've invested because you've all heard time

is what?

Money.

Time is money.

People like to say it.

Time is money, fam.

You know it.

Time is money.

Well, time is money.

Right now you're putting in time.

All the sacrifices that you make, all the parties you don't go to, all the birthday parties

you miss, all the weddings you don't go to.

I'm not saying if you're the best man in the wedding.

I'm not saying Mr. Sisters Wedding.

I'm not saying Mr. Grandmother's 80th birthday.

I'm saying all the dumb shit.

Like the people and things like my own best friend, one of my best friends, if I had a

birthday party in Pittsburgh, he's not coming.

Marcus is not going to be there.

I got engaged.

He drove up.

Was there to watch it happen?

He hugged me and drove his ass two hours back to where he came from.

He don't hang around and stay and kill off time.

Now, I know his mindset is like, yo, if I got approved to you, my love for you, by me being

at your birthday party sitting there for 10 hours, you're soft because this is a dude

that I know if I needed something back against the wall, if I needed something, somebody

to save me in the middle of the ocean, you got to send a jet.

You got to throw $100,000 in cash in the water.

If you have two to save me, he would do it in a New York minute in a heartbeat.

I can count on him to do all kinds of stuff, but I cannot count on him to come to my birthday

party.

I can't count on him to come drive four hours away to come kick it all the time.

You got to, it's called prioritizing your time in life.

So there's some things that you're going to have to give up.

If you invest the sacrifices now, man, if I could tell you the parties, the yachts that

you're going to be able to rent yourself, what if I told you that the dumb parties that

you shouldn't be going to right now because you can't even afford it?

Even if you put the time in right now, 10 years from today, you'll throw a party on a

yacht, what 100 of your favorite people, what a chef on it and one bad a night.

What if the vacation you missed that you shouldn't be going on right now?

I told you in 10 years, we'll take you to different islands in Europe on a boat so your

family that's never even left their city can look at different islands in different places,

things that you only see on postcards.

Even if the spaghetti dinners that you miss on Sunday, like I did with my grandmother,

when I was on the grind, that was our family ritual.

I missed all of them for years.

But what if I told you a couple meatballs you missed right there would allow you the opportunity

to take care of your grandmother for 20 years, or allow you the opportunity to retire

your mother for 40 years of her life?

Maybe what happens is people want to take care of grandma, people want to retire their

mom, people want to take their wife to exotic locations, they want to take their friends

to VIP everything and they're doing it before they've earned the right to do it.

They're spending all of it too soon.

No discipline, no patience, no process.

Instead of giving it time, giving it time, giving it time, I'm 17 years in the game and

now I'm building a nice size house.

And people, oh man, this is a nice house.

You got hot tub, cold tub, steam room, sauna, Jiu-Jitsu mats, weight room, cardio equipment.

You got all this stuff.

What is this?

Oh my.

But house I've been in for the last 10 years, it's nice, real nice, but it ain't.

You ain't be like, oh man, that's the man right there.

They're doing millions of dollars in business.

It's a nice neighborhood, it's a nice house.

Before that, I was in a small apartment, three bedrooms, one car garage, six years in the

business.

Man, Natalie, you know what I could have afforded six years in the business?

I was making over a mill, I could tell you that.

Every year, like clockwork, guaranteed, living in an apartment, three bedrooms, one car

garage.

This is why we're building a big old house right now.

It's the short term sacrifice, long term gain.

It's pay the price now so you can enjoy yourself down the road.

Everybody thinks they're entitled to work life balance.

All this entitlement attitude out there, listen, news flash, nobody owes you shit and nobody's

coming to save you.

Nobody's giving you shit.

So if you want work life balance, I think you should want that.

But trust and believe you gotta go earn it.

Because if you give it to yourself too soon, just like if you spend all the money you have

too soon, you ain't gonna have any when you really want it.

You ain't gonna have any when you really need it.

And so I'm sorry to disappoint you all out there.

I think when you're first starting out on the grind in the beginning, I don't think we

should be talking about work life balance.

I think we should be talking about work life grind.

Take care of yourself.

I didn't say ignore everything.

Pay the price while you can.

I think you earn the right to have a great schedule in work life balance.

Otherwise what happens is you end up giving up what you truly want down the road.

To have it all.

I want you to have it all.

I don't want you to be miserable.

I don't want you to hate life.

I don't want you to not enjoy life.

And here's what's gonna happen.

People are gonna tell you, oh, Johnny, what happens if your aunt gets sick and you don't

get to get that time back from her.

And she dies.

That's why you should every weekend you should take off.

Or all Sally, you got all these years to work.

Why do you want to put it all in now?

You got to enjoy yourself.

Why you can?

While those things are true, I think it's a play on weakness.

Yes, there is a chance that all the grind and that's happened.

Something could happen to me and I could die and then, you know, oh, man, I could have

all that time with my family.

You can't take nothing with you.

But guess what?

I got a bunch of renewals to leave behind to my family.

They're gonna be in a better position than I was in to start this life.

There's some real estate out there for them.

There's some money left aside for them.

Yeah, there's a chance.

Things can happen.

But guess what?

The grind was able to retire a mama at 50.

And retiring mama at 50 was caused by me having no time for bullshit in my 20s.

Yeah, oh, you got all this time to live and enjoy yourself.

Guess what?

You ever hear of the rappers talking about life occasion?

A staycation?

What I'm talking about is I want you to build, I want you to have work like balance, but

I want you to have it all.

Time, money, resources to take care of your loved ones, things time to enjoy afterwards.

And all of it has a price, man.

There's no you just get to have everything that you want.

No, I don't want you to, we're on Earth one time.

You're damn right.

You got one time to live.

You're right.

I could die tomorrow.

You're right.

You're right.

And I would, you know, what people do?

They pull up the Steve Jobs.

Oh, he was miserable and on his deathbed, he said he wish he would have did this, he wish

he would have did that.

Why I read his book and it seemed like he was just a grouchy pain in the ass all the time.

I don't, I think that's a bad one person to look at and say, oh, he had all these regrets.

Yeah, I'd have regrets too.

If I was treating everybody like shit, was cheating on my wife and having kids that I ignored

and all that shit, I would too.

But I'm telling you right now, I have a friend of mine that got cancer right now and he's

like, I got to tell you and he got young kids and he's like, I got to tell you, man, if

I took my last breath, I feel, I feel good.

I have no regrets and he's a grinder.

He was such a grinder.

He got to retire early.

He said, man, you know what's crazy is that this business, the work, the people became

my family because when I realized that I was sick and I look at the top five people, the

first five people I called and the first 10 people I called, the majority of them were in

our business, not even my own family.

A couple of them were, but this business, people became my family in it.

So I just, you know, chew up the meat and spit out the bones out there.

It's not a one-size-fits-all thing.

I think the way to, on the grind, not kill yourself in the process is the schedule things.

Plan when you're going to take a day off, plan your rewards, put in your schedule, time

for yourself.

My body and spirit, to me, is the way you find balance.

Is taking care of yourself mentally, physically, and spiritually.

things in there that are priorities to you if you got a family, you know, invest

the time into your kids, invest the time into your wife, husband,

plan it in your schedule. Understand you may like I know, I grind, I work hard,

but I know I got another gear to me. If it takes us an extra year to to get to

a hundred million and I could have done it sooner, but I can look my kids in

their face and I know that I'm not being a bad dad. I know I'm a good dad.

I'll take it. If I get to still have some time with my wife and family,

I'll take it if it takes us a couple extra years to get to a billion or get to a

half a bill or whatever I'll take it. But in the beginning, those of you

that are in the beginning phases of building something, you got to understand,

you got to go all in or you're going to get it. And if you're young,

I think you got to pay the price right now to earn an unbelievable life of work life balance.

Eliminate the BS distractions. Watch, look first, if you're cutting time,

look at the dumb stuff you guys do, all the fantasy football and golfing and soccer leagues

and all this other stuff. If you're not where you want to be, just consider it.

I'm not telling you what to do. I don't have all the answers. I'm not God.

I don't know it all. All I'm doing is speaking from my experience of leading people.

And you judge a tree by the fruit that it bears. And I could tell you I'm proud of none of us are

perfect, but I'm proud of the circle of people that I've had a chance to do business with for a

long time. And I look to my left and I look to my right and I see great mothers. I see great wives.

I see great husbands, great fathers. And I look at a lot of fruit and a lot of happiness and great

schedules and great joy going on with the people that started from the bottom because now we hear.

And so I'm telling you from experience of people led. I'm telling you from my own experience.

These are the things that I've experienced and I hope these things would help somebody out there.

If it does, would you do me a favor and share the grind cast with people, share it with people so

we can impact. There's no charge to this. We ain't making no money on this. We ain't got no sponsors.

We ain't got nothing. We ain't making no money on this. The money we're making is just knowing

that we're helping people out there. Let me know if it's helping you at all. Shoot me a message.

Let me know you're getting something out of it. Share it with somebody that's all I would ask you to do.

And I really appreciate the time you guys invest into the grind cast and we'll see you next time. Let's get it.