The Fantastic Life

Pick 3

 

Living The Fantastic Life requires sustained sacrifice (The Fantastic Life Rule # 5) that takes away from other facets of life.  Here is your choice—work, sleep, family, fitness, or friends:  Pick 3 to win this week. Each week, throughout your life you get to decide which ones will get your time because there are only 24 hours in a day and only 7 days in a week.

I just started this balance topic in a recent LIFEies.  (Click here to read more).  Balance, for me, is based on a yearly perspective.  Weekly, I can be really unbalanced or, to put it another way, weekly, I am always unbalanced.  Whether it is working 80 hours in a week, training for my next event, travelling to see my kids, or getting my 7 hours of sleep night,  I track my progress daily so I ensure I have some “balance” at the end of the year.

 

A balanced year is a great year.  But a Fantastic year is one where you set goals, have great clarity and make them happen.

Give yourself  permission to be focused on your goals, hit achievements and live YOUR Fantastic Life.

 

Rule #9 from my book The Fantastic Life: Recognize there Are Two Kinds of Pain
The pain of regret or the pain of discipline?  Which will you choose? You will have to make sacrifices by getting rid of all the noise that holds you back from what you really want.

 

Work, Sleep, Family, Fitness, or Friends: Pick 3
Randi Zuckerberg calls this the entrepreneur’s dilemma. Does it ring true for you?

By Jessica Stillman

March 12, 2018

Endless ink (and pixel space) has been spent discussing the challenges of work-life balance for founders. But entrepreneur and former Facebook director of market development (and Mark Zuckerberg sibling) Randi Zuckerberg managed to convey the challenges and tradeoffs of the entrepreneurial lifestyle in a rather more concise fashion on Twitter a few years back:

Want to see your kids, keep fit, and keep your business going? Forget sleep, according to this formula. And you won’t be spending much time with your friends, either. As Zuckerberg explains in this short interview, for her, fitness and friends often fall by the wayside, a sad reality but one she’s willing to level with the world about.
Some founders agree.

This sounds harsh, but it’s true, according to a recent interview with Storenvy founder Jon Crawford on Founder Dating. “Work, sleep, family, fitness, or friends–pick three. It’s true. In order to kick ass and do big things, I think you have to be imbalanced. I’m sure there are exceptions, but every person I’ve seen riding on a rocket ship was imbalanced while that rocket ship was being built. You have to decide if you want it,” Crawford declares.

“If you want to spend a lot of time with your friends and see all the Oscar-nominated movies and get good sleep at night and exercise, then it’s going to be hard to give a start-up everything it needs. If you care about your startup more than you care about all those things, then go for it. But it comes with sacrifice,” he says, leveling with would-be founders. Along similar lines, other entrepreneurs (or more often ex-entrepreneurs) have confessed that the start-up lifestyle and family life can be an impossible balance.

Is this true for you?

Zuckerberg’s hard formula has the benefit of concision and clarity, and the endorsement of Crawford and others, but I’m curious, is it true for you? Several high-profile entrepreneurs, such as Basecamp co-founder and CTO David Heinemeier Hansson, have publicly declared that they can get all the work required for their start-up to succeed done in a moderate 40 hours a week, leaving, presumably, enough time for exercise, family, friends, and fitness (or at least more than two of those).

Are these apparently more balanced founders benefiting from special circumstances? Are they painting a slightly rosier than reality picture of their workloads and lifestyle for public consumption?

What do you think?

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