How To Balance Work and Life and Family?
Mike’s Blog 120
The cool thing about being a young dude is you don’t have to worry about much. I think this is why a lot of investors like to invest in young college kids like a Mark Zuckerberg starting Facebook. You can just pretty much live on nothing – pizza, instant noodles, cheap beer. That was me for decades.
But once you get older – health is important. You may be fortunate enough to find someone to marry and raise kids with (lucky me) and personal life outweighs the late nights on the laptop grinding at your latest app startup.
The struggle now, is how to balance the knocking on my home studio door from my kids to go out for a bike ride vs getting the next video blog done? How to balance finishing a project plan for the e-commerce series when the family wants to go out for dinner for the evening.
But on the flip side, I have not been drinking for years. I have been sleeping earlier (granted I’m woken up a bit by baby Maggie), waking up earlier, and feeling much healthier.
Yet, man, I wish I had this system when I was single with so much less short term cashflow pressure and family commitments. Yet at the same time, maybe I would not have even gotten this discipline (developed muscle) if I had stayed single. Many people say that having kids really forced them to be better organized and structured in their day.
So really – for me – my mornings are my sacred work times. The family knows – don’t bother daddy in the morning in his home office. He is writing (like I am now), or making content and tweaking the website, or building out SOPs and systems for the team.
The afternoon, this is when things can get a bit mixed. I pick up Miles from kindergarten. I’m on phone calls, replying to emails – so it is less “discipline muscle” required.
Still, it isn’t dedicated family time. And I am often out from the home studio on afternoons and evenings at meetings, events, or over in Hong Kong for business cases.
Our idol Gary Vee even says balancing his work and career is his biggest challenge. I’m a workaholic, I love what I do, and I want to spend every waking hour building out Global From Asia more – more chapters, more content, more benefits for our GFAVIP members, getting better things for the community – and it is so exciting.
Plus I mix up my family into the business. Why hide it -have Miles in some intros of the podcast. Take them to some of our bigger events.
Still, I don’t have this puzzle solved, and sometimes I worry my kids don’t understand why I can’t always hang out with them. I wish I could read Dr Suess books to them all day but the reality is – I gotta work my behind off to make sure they can go to these expensive schools. Yet at the same time – isn’t that weird – I could just spend my time teaching them and save that money I’m working for to get them to go to school. Catch 22.
Any feedback or thoughts?