Adam Sand argues work-life balance isn't about perfect scheduling but about purpose and persistence. He lost $1.079 million in April and $12,000 in February by burning himself out for his business, and now emphasizes health, community accountability, and belief in your purpose as the real survival tools.
Have you ever felt like your business is draining the life out of you? That is exactly where burnout lives. Today we are getting incredibly real about the myth of work and life balance and how I personally survived a business betrayal that cost me over $1 million this year.
I've been to therapy, so they explained it like a tire, right? And they said you have like your family part of the tire and you have your business part of the tire and you have your health part of the tire. And if any one of those compartments is low on air, you get like this flat tire effect. Takes more energy to get through the day because one part of the tire is low on air. I think that some people look at work-life balance is this like threading of the needle throughout the day where it's like, I'm going to wake up, I'm going to do my morning meditation, I'm going to go to work, I'm going to go to the gym, then I'm going to come home, I'm going to practice playing the guitar, I'm going to eat a healthy meal, and then I'm going to brush my teeth and do my stretches and then go to bed. I'm not perfect with work-life balance, but I love the work that I do for the most part. I love it more when things are going right. I love it more when things are happening, like where you had a deal where you didn't sell it, you didn't build it, you didn't collect it, you didn't touch the file. And that's a thing that's a win. And then it's like, how do we do that more? Right? How do we create that circumstance more? It really comes down to your own belief in what you're doing. You have to have belief in what you're doing and you have to have a reason why you're doing it. Because if you have belief and a dream, then you can be persistent. And persistence allows you to fight through everything else. If you take the most capable person and the most persistent person, and put them up against each other, the most capable person will gradually decrease in their persistence. But even if the most persistent person doesn't have the capability, they will win. And that's like when Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett are looking at like CEOs and leaders for like the companies that they buy and invest in, they look for persistence over competence. And sometimes the hard reality we face is that we don't have belief in ourselves or our business, or we don't have a reason why we're doing it. And then that translates into a physiological reaction that looks like anxiety. But what it is, is it's this creeping voice inside you that says, 'I'm not good enough. I don't belong here.' And the reality of that could create a consequence. And sometimes, if you're at a 3 out of 10 level of happiness, it's bad enough that you're not fulfilled, you're not happy, but it's not so terrible that you're willing to take a grenade and blow it up, then you will just continue. And that is where burnout comes from. So it's not so terrible that you're going to leave. Certainly not good, it's definitely not great, but it's not bad enough that you'd be willing to like blow it up and like start over from scratch. Because that fear is enough to make you stick around. And when you're in those places, you have to find that belief in that reason, and then you have to be able to transfer that belief and that reason to the people around you, because that's the only reason they're going to stay, is if your vision is big enough for theirs to fit into it. And I believe that you have what it takes. And I believe that you can do it. I believe that you have the systems around you, the processes that are proven to work. You have access to the training and you have access to a room of people in my team and the other people in the platform group with you that are gonna hold you accountable and to give you the environment where it's like, oh, like someone else got a win. I could get a win too. But you wanna take care of your health because you can't fill from an empty cup when you are drained, when you're martyring yourself, your business, which I did all last year. All last year I martyred myself for my business. We launched platform. I got betrayal. I had all these things that happened, and I went through it again this year. This year I'm not martyring myself like I did last year, but I faced a betrayal last year in February, and I faced a betrayal this year in April. Last year the betrayal cost me $12,000. This year the betrayal cost me $1,079,000. And I have to put a smiling face on for people, and I'm dealing with this year's better than I dealt with last year's. Things don't stop going wrong, things don't get better, you just get better.
