In this solo talk, Leila Hormozi challenges the conventional notion of work‑life balance, arguing that it is a misleading myth that treats work and personal life as separate, opposing entities. She illustrates the problem with anecdotes—a friend upset by after‑hours work calls and an employee who burned out after an intense startup phase—showing how people swing between extreme over‑work and rigid, artificial boundaries. Hormozi contends that true fulfillment comes from aligning work with one’s values and energy, rather than imposing arbitrary “should” rules. She emphasizes that work is part of life, and life is part of work; therefore, seeking a perfect balance is futile. Instead, she encourages embracing imperfection, accepting unbalanced moments, and letting go of societal expectations. By focusing on personal values, setting and communicating boundaries, and doing work that energizes you, individuals can reduce unhappiness that stems from the belief that life should be neatly compartmentalized.
Chapters
I was at dinner with my friend the other night and her phone rang and it was, I want to say, 5:45, and she looked absolutely pissed off. And I was like, what's going on? Why are you so pissed that your phone's ringing? And she's like, oh, it's work, but like they know that I don't work past 5 PM. She looked very angry. And this incident reminded me of so many others that I've had, which is it's people trying to achieve work-life balance. And this is a question I get all the time, which is, Layla, how do I achieve work-life balance? How do you balance work and life? Like, how do you do it, right? And I get this from other entrepreneurs. I get this from people that are young and just coming up in the workplace. And I get this from clients and family and friends, right? The first thing that I would open this with is that I believe the idea of work-life balance is absolutely misleading. I do not believe it exists. It makes no sense to me. And the reason for that is if you say that it is work-life balance, you are saying there are two separate things. Okay? As if one, work is not part of your life and as if your life is not part of your work. So to demonstrate there are two separate things, ask yourself these two questions, right? If tomorrow you got fired from your job, would it not affect your life? Well, obviously it would affect your life, right? The other question is, you know, think about this, right? If I gained 50 pounds, would it affect my performance at work? Most likely it would for most people. And so to look at them as two things that we have to balance is just, it's, it's absolutely misconstrued and it leads us to try and solve these problems in ways that are not productive, right? What happens often, what I've seen happen a lot, I'll give you one example, was I had somebody who worked for us. And she came into the company at a time where it was absolutely like we needed all hands on deck. We were starting something new. There's only 4 people on the team, and we were all working like basically from when we woke up to when we went to bed. That's just how it is when you're starting a, like, a new line, new product line, a new part of the company, right? You're just like grind, grind, grind. And like, I mean, I like it. I think it's invigorating, and you learn a ton, you grow a ton. And she liked it while she was doing it. But the irony is that after that happened, she said to me, she goes, Leila, I will never sacrifice the rest of my life ever again to work that much. And in that moment I was like, fuck, I lost you. And the reason for that is because it's going from one extreme to another, right? It's believing that there shouldn't be bursts and short times at work where you will be working a ton of the time in order to advance, in order to help the company grow, in order to grow yourself, right? It's believing that that's wrong. There's something wrong with it. I don't know why people believe that. But anyways, what happens often is people a lot of the times are in that space, right? And then they go to this place where they say, I'm not going to work until 9:00 AM and I'm done at 5:00 PM. And please do not Slack me or email me because these are my working hours, right? As if somebody else is supposed to respect these invisible boundaries that they set for themselves, right? It's your job always to set boundaries and to hold them. It's not other people's jobs to know what those are unless you voice them, right? But regardless to say, it's going from one extreme to another. It's going from extreme flexibility to extreme rigidity. And that's what a lot of people do with work-life balance. They just put in place, rather than saying, what do I value? And not asking yourself, what should it look like? But what do I value? They say, I need rules. Rules are for people who do not have values. Okay. Just like when you're building a company, if I'm trying to create the culture of the company, if I'm trying to make sure it works well, I'm trying to build operations. I start with values because I cannot make 200 fucking SOPs for this company. It's not practical. Things are going to change in 2, 3 weeks. I need people to operate with value-minded, right? They need to come from a place of value. And so it's the same in terms of how you balance your own life, balance, right? How you manage your own life, right? And so a lot of the times I think where this comes from is this, this living in the land of should, right? Like, I shouldn't sacrifice other parts of my life to work this much. I shouldn't, uh, you know, not see every single fucking baseball game from my kids because I'm working. I shouldn't X, Y, and Z, right? So we keep shoulding ourselves. This is something my friend Trevor talks about, like, are you shoulding yourself? Which I think is funny, but I do believe that's actually the reason most people are unhappy and think that they need this work-life balance. And I know that I've been in a situation before where I tell people, I'm like, yeah, I work like, you know, 14 hours a day. People are like, That's insane. Like, you must have terrible deficits in the rest of your life, and you must be, you know, absolutely unhappy and mentally unhealthy. And I was like, oh shit. And I remember, like, for a brief period of time, I want to say a year and a half ago, I literally was like, maybe they're right. Maybe I've got fucked up shit that I haven't looked at. And I started putting more boundaries at work and trying to work less and doing that whole thing. And you know what's funny is I came to realize, I was like, if I'm energized by work, right? Like, if, if when I work I literally create more energy within myself, then why should I fucking do less of that to go do what? Watch Netflix? Go to a movie with somebody? What else is going to be more fun than what I'm doing here? Nothing, right? I think that, um, oftentimes what we are doing is we are, uh, trying to meet an expectation that people who we do not even like hold for us, right? It's our family, it's It's our friends. It's the people that are imposing their own judgment on our lives. And so that is why so many people say, you know, what's work-life balance? And, you know, I think it's unfortunate that a lot of people don't have supportive spouses. They don't have supportive friends. They don't have supportive people in their lives to tell them it's fucking okay to work 14 hours a day if you like it, dude. And are you going to like it every day? No. But if you like doing it generally and most of the time you get energized, keep going. Right? What else are you going to do with your time on this earth? I think that the reason so many people are unhappy to this, right, are unhappy about, um, their work especially, um, and you see it often where somebody works a ton and they're actually really enjoying it and then they get this like weird resentment, um, and it's because they have this idea in their mind that things are not the way they should be, that you should be able to just shut off after 6 PM, that you should be able to not get emails after a certain time, should, should. And so I think it's an argument with reality and that is why so many people struggle with it. Is that they believe things should look a certain way and that they should have this beautifully balanced life where they spend just the right amount of hours every day and every week with their family, with their kids, with their friends, uh, exercising, this, that. That never happens. Once you accept reality, which is that everything's connected, there— you cannot balance two things that are the same, and that you accept that there is no balance, right? How would you feel? Right? What if you were free to be imperfect and unbalanced? And so I think that most people are asking the wrong questions. It's, how do I get work-life balance? When the question is, what would my life look like if I let go of these ideals in my mind? What if I was allowed to be imperfect? What if I was allowed to be unbalanced? What would I do? And instead, I think we operate within these constraints that have been put on us from society and from friends and from family that's nagging in our ears, telling us that we're weird, right? And then we impose these ideas on ourselves. And so I want to say, I don't believe in work-life balance. I believe that they're integrated. They're one. It's just a system that holistically has different parts to it that are all working together. I believe that most of us, I know myself, like the ideas that I used to hold, right? Because the reason I can talk to you about this is because I used to think this way, are false. And the only thing that's creating the unhappiness is your belief that it should be a different way. And so if you can let go of that belief and just believe and know that you are supposed to be unbalanced and you are supposed to be imperfect in everything that you do in your work and in your life, that you are always going to have parts of your life that contradict each other. You know, you're going to have a deadline for work that you've got to stay there till 6:00 PM, but your kid's soccer game starts at 5:00 PM and you're like, fuck, what do I do? And you have to compromise and not meet either 100%. And you're going to think it shouldn't be this way. I should always be done at 5, but that's not how fucking life is. There are no shoulds. It's just what is. And this happens to everybody. And so I think that for anyone who's trying to find work-life balance, if you can just let go of the ideal, if you can let go of this fake made-up fantasy that you can compartmentalize your life to that extent and that you can spend the right amount of hours on absolutely everything every day, right? Let go of trying to control it all and just say, I'm going to be unbalanced and I'm going to be imperfect. I think you'll be a much happier human for that reason. I know I am. And so I hope that was useful for you. I hope if you're trying to achieve work-life balance, you can make that switch in your mind, right? It's okay. It's normal. It's to be expected that you will be imperfect and unbalanced. And I think that the only pain that you are feeling now, if you feel pain, is that of one, doing work that does not energize you, or two, believing that it should be different than it is, arguing with reality. So with that, I hope that you have a fantastic rest of your week or day, and that was of use to you.
