Saul Talks about Work Life Balance - 10 Year Entrepreneur

Hello. Hello, Good morning. This is another Saul Talks. I am coming to you. I only have 45 minutes between now and when the next call starts. So I always say we're going to keep it short, but this one, maybe we'll actually keep it kind of short. I'm Saul. You've probably seen some other videos if you're on this channel. If not. I am an online seller, business owner, been doing this for nine years. Have a bunch of content out there if you want to go watch it. This series or this channel is mainly just me talking to you guys based on questions that you send me through my Discord group or through Twitter or just things that I've seen online that I want to talk about. Normally, I talk about very specific, tangible how to's. My videos have been on Amazon, sourcing or things like that. I've had videos. My last video was on delegation hiring, which you guys seem to really like. This one's a little bit different and I apologize. My hat's a little crooked there. This one. I've seen a lot of rhetoric online, and I actually saw a recent tweet that went a bit viral and there were a bunch of comments that I didn't entirely agree with.

And so I want to. Instead of kind of writing a tweet out, I figured I'd make a quick video on it. And honestly, it's about work life balance and whatever that means. Right. I think that's a buzzword. What does work life balance really mean? But I see a lot of people, I come from the world of Twitter. That's where I spend most of my time. I got granola on me. That's where I spend most of my social media time. And on Twitter, you would think word balance doesn't really exist at all. I think the rhetoric there is hustle culture, hardcore, gotta go deep, gotta go in. If you're not working eight hours a week, you're a bum. You don't want it bad enough. If you're not making $5,000 a day, log off and go lock yourself in a room forever. And obviously, it's a bubble, right? I mean, we have to be realistic here. But I think the thing I saw was it said those that focus on work life balance live a more mediocre life. It was something kind of around that sentiment, and.

I just wanted to talk about what that means to me and what work life balance has meant to me over the last 10 years of this journey. So, you know, I'm 32 years old and it's 2025 when I was 22 years old. So 10 years ago, when I was actually 18 to 22, 18 to 23, balance didn't really exist too much only because I couldn't afford to have balance. I didn't really understand the game. So I was just trading my time for money. I worked right out of high school, I worked full time. I was making $7.15 an hour. That was minimum wage. I remember when I got my promotion to $9 an hour, that was really exciting. I thought I had made it at that point and I started doing school part time. Left the house when I was 21, had to get an apartment. And so then I eventually kind of worked my way into middle management where it was, I was a salaried position. I was making, I think by the time I was 22 or 23, I was making 48,000 a year, which was just wild. But I was working. You know, I don't think it was more than I could handle, but it was more than I was used to. I think it was between 50 and 60 hours a week. And I was essentially on call. Like my, my team, we had to, we were staffing a fitness center and we were open 18 hours a day. And I was in charge of all those team members from the front desk to the sales, to the kids room, to everything. And you know, if, if someone didn't show up at 5am who are they going to call? They're gonna call me. If my closer gets sick at 9pm, who are they gonna call? They're gonna call me. And so really it was between, you know.

11Pm and 4am that I was like somewhat at peace. But I would routinely get calls at 4:30 and have to deal with stuff. And that's when I started finding Internet and started selling online. And we don't have to get into that whole story about how we, how I got from there to here, but I think a really big shift for me over the course of the next decade was trading my hours for money was not something that made sense anymore. And I think the people that you see that we glorify that are mega rich, some of them are workaholics, but I don't think they the workaholics because they're addicted. But some of them aren't, right? Some of them just kind of, they find their four hour workweek, right? Which it's a popular book. They work where they want, they travel, they do other things, but they're no longer trading their time for money. And I think this is a really, really hard transition for a lot of young entrepreneurs and a lot of young business owners. And particularly when I see a lot of young folks getting to Amazon because we're used to trading time even in school, right? You trade, you have to study. You're essentially trading time in for a good grade. And then when you go and you get your first job, it's usually retail or food or entry level. And your paycheck is entirely dependent on how many hours you showed up at an office or logged in.

Most of those jobs don't really care what you've done, right? It's really just like, how long have you worked? What is the time in on the work?

And then that mentality kind of carries with you. And so when I see people starting businesses and starting Amazon and things, certainly there's a level of effort and time and energy that's going to be required to make it happen, right? No one's going to be there or hold your hand. No one's going to be there to push you to be immensely successful. But it doesn't actually take very long where you can start getting to the point where you get to leverage.

Some money or some other things to get out of the time sink. That is like putting yourself in those positions to do everything yourself. And I'm not talking for like, you know, if you started a business last week, you know, not necessarily talking to you in this unless you had a nest egg and other things that already had already exited a previous business or something. But I'm talking more to the people who have been at this for a while, have found some level of success, maybe feeling like they're plateauing, but they hold on to everything incredibly long. And this kind of goes back into delegation, too.

I have a young family. I have other businesses I run. We talked about in the last video, right? So there's like six or seven businesses I'm involved in. None of that would have been possible if in my very first business, I held super tightly to everything and realized, you know, I would. Either I was the only one that could do it, or I valued my time the same way I did when I first started the company. So a great example is, you know, I own a warehouse company, 3PL, so we prep products for other businesses. And in our businesses that we own, when we first started shipping out of.

New Jersey, when we first brought our company out of these big other 3pls in house for the first year, I did all the shipping myself. My wife helped. We went to the warehouse every day. We started shipping and I valued my. I mean, at the time, I could tell you the value of my time was somewhere about $2 a shipment. That's what it came down to. So if I shipped 100 units in a day, pretty much saved myself $200.

Or I made $200, however you want to look at it. And I did that for a year, and I shouldn't have done it for a year. I think I did that too long, personally. It took me a year to finally get my butt in gear and hire someone. And what that's happened, though, is, yes, I've hired someone. I don't go to the warehouse anymore. My two team members now, to handle all that. But what it's allowed me to do is, I guess we're getting into delegation a little bit, but it's allowed me to, number one, spend more time with my family, which I think is incredibly cathartic for me and super, super helpful. But it's also allowed me to have conversations, make these videos, do things that will press forward the entire business, the entire venture, my entire world, and not just specifically that one business. And maybe I want that business to grow. So I get out of doing the everyday shipping and I move more into marketing. I move more into other things. But I. I don't add more hours. I just shift the hours around so that my hours slowly become worth more. So for a while, I was. My hours were worth. When I was shipping, my hours worth about 50 or 60 bucks. Goal is that my hours should be worth $500, right? That's. That's what I want my hours to be worth. And so to get there, I have to slowly give up things that are worth less, find things that are worth more. It also means, though, that if I do find a task that I can do that's, let's say, worth $500 an hour, it's essentially worth 10 hours of what I was doing before. Which means that, you know, for me, I really don't want to have to work 80 hours. I didn't do this. I didn't start these companies or join these companies or find these investments to work myself into the ground.

I was tired of working the 50, 60 hours and be on call. I don't want to trade that job for something like this just because it pays me more money. So my goal is to create a world where I get to spend time with family and explore things that I enjoy, even if they don't necessarily have an obvious way of making me money. And so when I saw that article about people live mediocre lives when they focus on work life balance. You know, the idea of work life balance as a phrase, I don't love what is balance. But I think working more hours does not necessarily mean more success. I think that that is what like I saw a lot of people commenting and reposting and they were like, oh yeah. And like these people don't want to work 80 hours a week. They're gonna like be left behind. Or like, oh, I did everything and everything I work, worked myself to the bone for a decade.

And you know, I think that there's a level of grit that's really beneficial for a business, for an owner. But I also again, firmly believe that.

It'S not a requirement. I guess that's where like, and maybe I'll get some hate for this. I just don't think it should be a requirement to work a tremendous amount of time or hours to find success. I think if you can find a way to be successful, whatever success means to you, by working a way, a comfortable amount of hours, by actually working instead of just like twilling your thumbs, you can be as successful as I'm working 80 hours a week. And it could be how you use your time differently, it could be how you use leverage differently. It could be that you're choosing to do higher leveraged things with your time, even if you're not spending money to hire someone or to have help. But it's the same thing as if you go and start restaurant because you have a passion for restaurants. You know, the margin on a restaurant is low, right? Food, food has low margin. Unless you know you're, you're a unicorn. And let's say someone spent 50 hours a week working in a restaurant they owned and someone else spent 50 hours a week growing an agency. You know, I'm not necessarily pro agency, but let's say they went and started an agency. Good shot. That the person running the agency per hour is making tremendously more money.

And even if they worked 15 hours a week, they could probably make more money than someone working 50 hours owning a restaurant. And so I just. And maybe they're choosing to do that because they want again, like they want to spend time with their aging parents, they want to spend time with their kids, they want to do different things. I guess we're just kind of in a society that glorifies hustle. And I think hustle doesn't always mean time in. I think you can hustle by working smarter.

You know, getting in the right rooms, you know, asking great questions, asking for Help, right? People don't ask for enough help. I don't think so. I even took some notes here and I was, you know, I kind of talked about time and leverage. You know, I have written down you have hard versus smart versus experience. I think when you first start, things are hard because you don't know what to do. Then you start getting smart, you start working smarter instead of harder. And then as you gain more experience, everything just kind of falls into place over time. And as new challenges come up, you handle them faster, you handle them better. You know who to ask for help. You don't have to be spending the same amount of hours to figure it out because you've been doing it. And there are shortcuts, if you will. Like there are ways that you can pay people for help or to just watch YouTube videos. Where I think that I am going to agree with a lot of people is analysis paralysis is very real. And too many people watch too many videos and do anything. And you have to do something. You have to get in the game. But again, I don't think you have to kill yourself just to glorify the hustle. I wrote here generous with your time. A lot of the things that I've found in life, I'm not where I want to be yet, but. But how I've gotten here has been offering my time generously to people or organizations that I want to be a part of or I want to have a relationship with. Would have been possible if I didn't have that time to give, right? So if I was already working 50, 60, 70, 80 hours in job number one, my business number one, there's no way I could say, well, hey, such and such, I love what you're doing. How can I help you? Oh, yeah, of course we can meet. I can have a conversation with you for three hours on a Monday. Couldn't do it right? So, you know, that's again, where are you spending your hours? We all have the same amount of hours. How are we spending them is important. And the more kind of free hours you have, the more generous you can be with your time to show the people that you want to work with and to show your community that you care. And that's just benefited me greatly. I wrote here passion doesn't even exist. I'm not convinced that passion is something that does really exist in the business world. I think that we.

Even kind of what passion means in general. I think people are always trying to find their passion.

I don't know if passion is going to smack you in the forehead. I think when you rely on passion to guide you, the first bump you kind of fall off. Same as motivation. I think what we're striving for is momentum. You create momentum and momentum carries you. It's like when you ride a bike and it's really, really hard to go up a hill. But you have this pent up rate energy, right? So you're going to expend kinetic energy on the way down. So you've built it up going up the hill, you've built up this momentum. Then you start going downhill. That momentum carries you. That allows you to then have bumps, have issues, but the momentum is already there. Passion is harder to bottle in that way. And you start kind of questioning like, are you even passionate about this? When it gets hard? Some people at least work versus play. I think this one's big for me. I don't necessarily feel like I am working most of my day. I think, you know, if you, they always say like, if you find the right job, it doesn't feel like a job. I do, I do kind of agree with that. You know, I think that, do I enjoy every zoom meeting I'm on, right? Do I enjoy packing all those boxes? Do I enjoy managing HR related issues with employees? Not always, no. Like that's kind of part of the, part of the job, but the whole thing, like the whole kind of world I built for myself, the whole ecosystem and the problem solving and the building that is like I, I go to sleep thinking about it. I wake up thinking about it. I work a lot from my phone because when I'm on my phone, it doesn't feel like I'm clocked in. And to me, that's what I was trying to achieve when I left my job. I didn't want to feel like I had to clock in a certain time, clock out a certain time. And so it does feel like way more play right now. And it's not. Again, always fun. But.

I'm not doing it just to do it. I'm not. Again, this goes back to, I'm not hustling or forcing anything that doesn't feel right. If something starts to feel like I'm dreading it, then I take a step back and I start questioning, well, like, am I the only person that can do it? What is the benefit of it on my business? And oftentimes I'm not the only person that can do it. And then you have to start questioning, like, why are you dreading it? Are you dreading it because you don't understand it and if you don't understand it, then I try to go learn. I ask questions of people, I bring someone on, I go watch videos. And when I understand things better, I enjoy them more. But if I truly just like, cannot get out of my own way when it comes to something that I just am struggling with, that's what I honestly start. Start bringing on team members to help. Because if I'm not pushing myself because it's enjoyable and I want to be excellent at it, it's going to suffer. And I really want to ideally have someone in that role that does.

Does feel that way and does kind of wake up, right? I don't really wake up thinking about paid spend on meta or how to optimize every keyword on my SEO on Google. I don't. That's just not something that I, That I enjoy. There are people out there that absolutely do. They. They wake up, that's all they think about. And it's just like, that's all they want to talk about. They get excited about it. You hear, like, you bring it up and they just. Their whole energy changes. I want them on my team. Like, I want to harness that. I don't think I'm ever going to have that. So, you know, I do it best I can and then I pass it on to someone who has that energy. I also wrote down here wealth dash, goldfish.

You know, you see, a lot of times people say, well, you know, you make $10,000 a month, that's all you need. Make $20,000 a month, make $30,000 a month. We're kind of goldfish as humans, right? And we will spend. We will just.

If you get more money, it's really easy to spend more money.

And so.

Your best bet is to. And as boring as it sounds, right, like, budget is a word that people don't like. But I think you need to have like a set number that's kind of your every day, every month number. This is what I need to live. You have a little bit of money on top of that. That's. You got your play money. You don't even look at the rest.

For now. You know, you have, you have a goal, you have a plan. You know, you want to buy a house, you want to retire your mom, you want to do something. That's what that money's for.

The assumption that when we make more money, it's going to be forever. That's what kills people. You have a really great month. You have a $30,000 month.

You know, maybe you don't always have $30,000 a month. Maybe you have a $90,000 a month. That's amazing. But maybe three months from now, it goes back down to 15. For whatever reason, if we start spending like, you know, we're making all that money, it's very easy to get way ahead of ourselves. And that's why businesses go under. That's why people disappear. On social media, we see it with athletes all the time. And, you know, we talk about reselling. I've been doing the eight way challenge right now, and I've been talking hardcore about flips and how we find when we see a product, an item, like, what is the floor and what is the ceiling? And in your life, I think you got to figure out what your floor is. Like, what is your, what is your minimum spend? You don't have to live like a pauper, but like, what's your minimum spend?

You know, make sure you make that much money. And then anything on top of that, you know, you have a place for it, you park it somewhere, you do something with it. But you can't assume, you know, unless something dramatic is happening and you, you know, sell your company or, you know, something occurs like that. It's, it's, you know, it's scary to assume a lot of things early on until you have consistency under your belt. And, you know, it's so, it's. It's really frustrating to me when I. And I don't internalize the frustration, but I think I'm more frustrated because it's a trap that people fall into. And I see, you know, again on X, where you have these, these guys talking about if, you know, if you're not doing $1,000 a day, if you're not doing $5,000 a day, essentially kill yourself. Right? I mean, that's ridiculous. It's a huge. That's a crazy sentence. But they are just so aggressive. And I looked up some stats. You know, the median household income in the United States is $82,000. That's a household. And the weekly median personal income that's a person is $1,139 a week. So about $4,400 a month is the median. Weekly is the. We is the Median personal income $44,000 a year.

Maybe $50,000 a year somewhere in there. Wild, right? And you're here, you know, we have people talking, you know, they're making $15,000 a month, and.

That'S, you know, they're saying, you know, their life's over, or you, you know, you Figure out how to make $5,000 a month selling stuff on the Internet, clicking some buttons and, you know, you feel like shit.

So, you know, I try not to compare myself to those ahead of me too much, but, you know, it's, it's worth looking backwards a little bit. It's worth looking, seeing, you know, seeing what could be. And you know, that's the medians. There's a lot of people living under that. And so we strive for better, we want to be better.

But, you know, we talk about the work life balance going back to the beginning of this video.

You know, if you're, if you're sitting there making five times the median, right? You know, you're sitting there making $200,000 a year.

And you have kids and you have other responsibilities now. If you're, if you love the game, right, we talk about that. I think if you're absolutely like, again, if you wake up every day and you think about it and you just love it.

I think it's different than forcing it. But if you're sitting there trying to like, I gotta lock in, I gotta lock myself in this room. I gotta work 80 hours a week. But you got a two year old, you know, I, I think that that can be a detriment to, to your health. It can be detriment to your family. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna sit here and judge you for it. I just, you know, part of this video for me is just, it's telling you that it's okay if you don't, if you don't do it, if you don't, quote, unquote, lock in. And I also believe that again, you can take the same amount of hours. You're making 200k working 40 hours a week. You could take the 40 hours of making 500k. I don't think you have to add more hours. I think that you can take the same amount of hours and just leverage them differently. Start building systems, start bringing on people.

To help you with the 200, that'll allow you the space and freedom to go make more money doing other things or charge more money for the same thing you're already doing. I also wrote some other stuff on here called age and I wrote health. You know, your age is a factor here. You're 22 years old listening to this. Yeah, you got, you got some more, you got some more time. You have less responsibilities. You know, when I was young, I definitely worked way more than I work now. I was saying yes to everything. You know, I think it helped. I think it did help.

I had the energy for it. But at the same time, I was 21 years old. I was 20 years old.

I got engaged when I was, what, 23, 22.

Hopefully my wife doesn't watch this.

And.

Soon after, when I got into my mid-20s, I did start to slow down a bit. I started like, I wanted to spend more time with her. You know, we got. We got dogs. My. Her parents are getting older. Their parents are in their 70s. We started to focus on other things. But then I started again learning how to take the same hours that I was making $7.50 an hour doing and turn that into, hopefully a $500 an hour position by leveraging my experience, by leveraging, you know, content, YouTube videos that I could watch and learn things from.

By leveraging asking for help, by bringing on team members. And then. Your health is important. I had a pretty decent health scare last October. I've talked to a lot of other business owners who work themselves almost to death, you know, into the. Into the ground a little bit into the hospital for sure. And, you know, Burna, I think it's laughed at, but it's real. And so, you know, do you want to be conscious of what you're putting in your body, how much sleep you're getting? And you're just. Your overall health, you know, it's easy to ignore that if you're overworking yourself. So I kind of sit in the middle ground here. I sit on the fence. I think, you know, I don't know if this is going to connect with anyone. I don't know. I mean, I might get some hate for some reason for this one, but, you know, I just. I don't think it's one or the other. I think when we. When I saw that and I saw work life balance, I think. I don't.

I think the fairy tale work life balance is like, oh, well, I only work seven hours a day and I make a million dollars a year, and I don't have to try any harder, and I don't have to. It's gonna. You know, there's a level of handout that comes with, I think, some people's expectation of work life balance, which, you know, I'm not. I'm not on that end. But then the other side, which I saw on Twitter, was like, well, screw work life balance if you want. Everything that you want is at the other end of grinding and hustle. I don't believe that either. So I think this video kind of like sits somewhere in the Middle. And my biggest takeaway, if you got this far is purely, like, your value is not attached to the hours you put in. Like, if you can walk away with nothing else, just understand that there are, you know, there's a world where you make double what you're making now. And you work one hour a day. Now, do I think that you should work one hour today? No.

Unless you want to. That's the beauty of it. If you want to do it, then you should do it. But just know, like, working more does not 100% equal wealth or success.

You are spreading out your luck. You're spreading out some things. You're giving yourself maybe more of an opportunity to find it. But it also depends on the quality of work you're doing. Right? We've seen studies, I'm sure you've seen them, where it's like, the average employee that works eight hours a day in a salary position actually works, like, two and a half of those hours, like, doing something. They spend time in the bathroom. They spend time staring at the ceiling. They do random stuff.

And I'm pretty sure that's. It's like, yeah, some rooms, like, two and three hours a day of, like, actual work. So if you think about it that way, person making $50,000 a year, working 50 hours a week, or really, maybe they're only working 15 hours a week, but they have to show up and sit in an office somewhere for the other 35. So if you could master how to make Those, turn those 15 hours a week into $50,000, suddenly you can turn maybe 30 hours a week into $100,000.

So that's my takeaway. This one's in a little bit of a different video.

I'm happy to dive deeper into these things. Maybe I'll think about it and I'll get better thoughts out as time goes on. But that's where I am. Some of you are going to leave this video and be like, oh, sounds lazy.

I don't think I am. But that's for you to decide. Again, for me, I think I work a substantial amount, but it doesn't feel like work. And I created a life I've designed around the ability to eat lunch with my family, spend every morning with my son, and if my mom calls me, I need to fly somewhere to be with her because something's happened. I can do that. And that's. That's the life I want to design this life I want to live. I want to be there for T Ball. I want to go to gymnastics in the middle of the afternoon.

But I know that, you know, if I didn't do any of those things, maybe I could make a little bit more money. Maybe. But at the same time, this is. This is what I've decided, and I think it's working out so far. So thank you for watching, and I'll see you on the next one.