885 The Power of Counterbalance

This is five minute Friday. The person that I'm bringing on today, his name is Jay Papazian, and he talks about the one thing that you can do that will accomplish more by doing less. Okay, now, Sky Jay Papazian is an interesting guy, and I think you're gonna love this interview. He worked as an editor for Harper Collins for a while. Then he co-authored the bestselling series. Millionaire Real Estate with Gary Keller, who's co-founder of Keller Williams Realty, one of the top real estate agencies in the country. He now runs a top residential real estate team in Austin, recently co-authored the one thing, the surprisingly simple truth behind extraordinary results, which is a Wall Street Journal, Amazon, and New York Times bestselling author. And the one thing is a book for busy people who are just spinning their wheels and not getting anywhere fast.

There's a graphic that we created for the book, and I can't remember who made it in, but it's this idea of work-life balance. And that's an incredibly new phenomenon that we've even identified that as a problem. I don't think that, you know, serfs back in medieval times worried about their work-life balance, right? This actually showed up in the '80s. And a lot of that has been really exacerbated by the fact that cell phones and smartphones, there's no barriers between when we're at work and when we're at home. And that happened really rapidly. And you can see like the year the Blackberry came out, the number of times that showed up in popular literature just goes through the roof and it actually peaks with the iPhone. So I think that I love all the tools we have to be entrepreneurs from home and to not have to be renting and have the expense of an office, but we have to also have an adaptation to know when are we at work, when are we doing our work, and when are we at home and living our lives. And I think that that's a big challenge for us right now.

Do you think work-life balance is possible or is that a way, are we supposed to be having a balance in work and life?

You know, that's one of the lies that we identify in the book. It's actually being sold to us as a destination, this idea then we just get our life just really organized, it's all going to fall into place. And we'll have a great relationship with our kids and our spouse and with, you know, our work relationships. And it'll all be just like nirvana. And it's actually a verb and it's something that you have to do actively. That was like a big aha. It's a big point that I try to make. A lot of the people we work with every day are female entrepreneurs. and I think they have it doubly hard, right? They're trying to balance a strong obligation to family. They often neglect their personal life completely to take care of family and work. And so this idea that there's a Nirvana out there, it's a disservice. It makes us think that other people are succeeding when they're not. So it's just something you actively do.

So, I mean, what I'm hearing you say is that work-life balance is not possible. Is that right?

I think that is absolutely correct. That's the way we come at it. I think that a huge business, a hugely successful business, is by nature going to be a little bit messy. And if you're focusing on your one thing, like we talk about in the book, you're going to be neglecting a lot of the little things. I think that's okay to be out of balance professionally, but you can't neglect your health, you can't neglect your key relationships, you can't neglect your spirituality, if you neglect those things for too long, you're gonna have a real problem, a profound problem that might derail the work that you've done. We want people to be purposeful about it. And if I go into it, like there's an event we do every year where we host about 14,000 people over one week. And it's a grueling, you know, period of time working up to it. That week itself is really tough. I'm kind of an introvert, so I'm like, you know, and mobs of people for a week. and you just go into it knowing I've got to counterbalance. And that's kind of the word we introduce.

Gotcha.

Is that you're gonna consciously, it's okay to get out of balance, especially with work, but you've got to immediately counterbalance. You can't, you know, say, all right, you know, when this business goes public, I will go back and help them out. That might be too long, right? You might have neglected things for too long for that to work. So it's a regular sort of attending to those things so they never get too far out of balance.

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