Cameron HeroldFounder of the COO Alliance & Invest In Your Leaders Training

The Myth of Work-Life Balance for Entrepreneurs | Cameron Herold

8 Jul 2026 · 1 min

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In this short monologue, Cameron Herold challenges the conventional notion of a steady work‑life balance, describing it as a myth. He uses the vivid image of an elephant on a teeter‑totter to illustrate how entrepreneurs constantly shift their focus among various obsessions—fitness, friends, finance, family, vacations, and work—over periods of a few months. Herold explains that he and his wife Ashley have crafted a "vivid vision" for their marriage that explicitly outlines priorities across these domains. Rather than trying to keep every area perfectly balanced (which he says induces constant guilt), he advocates a deliberate rotation: work intensely on a couple of priorities while allowing others to slide, then switch focus later. The core message is to accept imperfect balance, manage guilt, and purposefully allocate energy to the areas that matter most at any given time.

Chapters

People always talk about like career-life balance. I don't think there's any such thing as career-life balance. What I've found for me is it's like an elephant on a teeter-totter. You're always kind of doing a little bit of this, that for 4 or 5 months or 3 months, you might be all about fitness and friends and finance. It's more about balancing all of the different obsessions in your business. Ashley and I have written a vivid vision for our marriage where we discuss friends and finance and family and vacations and what we do for money and relationships. We've discussed all this stuff, and I've written that for me, and I look at how can I work hard on couple of things, I might let a couple of other things slide, and then I try to work hard on a couple of other things. Because if I try to keep everything perfectly balanced, I feel insanely guilty all the time, and I realize there's no possible way. It's kind of— you got to just do a little bit of this.