My First Million - One Question Friday: How Do I Keep Relationships Healthy When I Work Long Hours?

Starting point is 00:00:07 Hey, MFM. My name is Rob. How do I keep my marriage and other relationships healthy when I work long hours? All right. It's one question Friday. Somebody asked a question about marriage. I've been married for a few years. I've been with my wife in a relationship for 10 years plus, and it's a pretty great relationship. Someone was asking me for advice on it. And I'm going to reference something that I used to do. So basically, I talked about this thing on this pots. Basically, I've got this new thing I'm working on. And my co-founder and my co-founder, and I'm a friend. I, we did something interesting that seems pretty obvious to me. But when I mentioned in the podcast, it surprised some people. But basically, we kind of like both had an idea that we wanted to work on. And we were like, cool, like, this is something I'm working. I would like to work on. Would you like to work on? And he said, yeah, whatever. And so we got a little bit of attraction. And we go, all right, we know this can work. But let's pump the bricks. Stop right now. And I want to have a conversation with you. And what I want to know is a bunch of questions.

Starting point is 00:01:05 And so I said, I sent him the same questions. And then I went and answered them on my own. And it basically outlined what, so here's the categories. It was, what do I want? So financially, I said what I want my personal net worth to be. I said that I want to have freedom. I want the ability to fly private. I want to live in different cities throughout the year.

Starting point is 00:01:27 I want to be present in my future children's and current wife's life. Current wife, you know what I mean? I want to own a bunch of different real estate. I want fun and adventure. I want to work hard, but I want to work like a lion, lying, meaning I'm willing to work like in grind for many weeks, but then I want to take three or four weeks off a year or five weeks off a year, and I want to travel the world comfortably.

Starting point is 00:01:53 I also said that I care about influence. I said I want a seat at the big boys table and for people to think that I'm really good at my job. And so I just said, like, here's like what I want in life. then we each answered a question of ways that were ways in which we want to get to where we want to go. So basically things we're willing to do. And I said, I'm willing to do this. I'm willing to do this.

Starting point is 00:02:12 And I'm willing to do this. Like, I'm not willing to hire 10,000 employees. I don't want that. I'm not willing to have recurring meetings. I'm not willing to do this or that. I am willing to work 80 hours a week. I am willing to put this first above every other project I have, things like that. And then finally, we said, like,

Starting point is 00:02:31 here's what we want out of this business. We want to aggressively scale it. That's what I said. I want to aggressively scale it. I want to hit $100 million in revenue in X amount of years. So anyway, really specific. And then he answered this on his own. And we came back together and we said,

Starting point is 00:02:45 all right, let's see where we align and where we don't align because I want to figure out right away if there's any deal breakers. And in fact, this is what I did when I sold my company. I said, HubSpot wanted to buy us. And I go, they sent me in a cold email. And they go, hey, we want to talk about partnership. And I was like, I don't know what partnership means. Does that mean you want to buy us?

Starting point is 00:03:02 Just tell me right away. And they said, yeah, we want to buy you. I said, cool. Here's a Google Doc. And I list out all the reasons why you don't want to buy us and where we stink. If that list is okay with you, talk to me again. And so they said, yeah, we're okay with everything on this list. It's none of it's that bad.

Starting point is 00:03:19 And we said, all right, cool, let's keep talking. And so anyway, my point is, is I've learned with relationships throughout the years, like marriages and business relationships and with my partner or. HubSpot, you want to get the difficult conversations out the way early on because that will literally save you a decade of heartache. And with my marriage, I did the same thing. This data is wrong every freaking time. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated. Whoa, I can see the client's whole history. Call, support tickets, emails, and here's a task from

Starting point is 00:03:58 three days ago I totally missed. So my wife and I, it sounds kind of lame because I don't want it to sound that my like business is so important to me that it like permutates into like my marriage. But in a way, it kind of does. But basically like two months or three months into dating, I was like, hey, just so you know, or maybe it was six months. I was like just so you know like I see us going places and like being together for a very long time and potentially marriage. Is that what you see? And she was like, yeah. I was like, oh, awesome.

Starting point is 00:04:30 We're on the same page. And then we actually outline, you know how like when people say they're like, yeah, I want to like have a nice house with kids and all this stuff? And I was like, all right, let's get really specific. Tell me how many kids do you think you want? You don't need to like tell me you want exactly three kids, but like give me a ballpark like where your intentions are now. And I know they might change. But give me like a ballpark and where they are. Okay, great. Now, how much money do you want to make each year? Okay, cool. Where do you want to live? Oh, you want to live here? Let's go in Zillow right now. Well, that house is $8 million. So let's work back. to like where how much that how we're going to afford that house great so we understand like where we want to be or you know financially let's talk about what we're willing to sacrifice in order to get that and we listed out all those things it's like look from my 20s business is going to come before like relationships so like meaning there's going to be a lot of times that I'm not going to be around when you need me but that's because I'm going to be dedicating a lot of time in order to get this other goal that we have that we're going to have in our 30s things like that and so

Starting point is 00:05:31 we really just outlined like very specifically where we wanted to be in 10, 20, and 30 years. And we did it exactly like a business where it was like, here's where we want to go specifically. Like here's how much money we want, how many kids we want, the type of lifestyle. We want the type of family we want in our life. If we wanted to raise them religious or not religious, like all this stuff. And of course, we knew it will change as we grow and get more information. But anyway, we did that to get that hard stuff out of the way. another thing that we do, which is like kind of lame, but you know how a company has okay

Starting point is 00:06:04 ours, which stands for objectives and key results. And like, you're supposed to set those quarterly. We and annually, you have like an annual target and then like quarterly like benchmarks. We do that for our life. And so we have an adventure one. We have a like relationship one. We have a financial one. And we have a physical fitness one where it's like, all right, here's where we like here's what we want to do like for our health. Here's what we want to the trips that we want to take. Here's what we want to be financially. Here's the ways that we want to like give back to our family and spend time with them. And we actually do these check-ins once a week. I use this journal that my friend started, her name's Kat. It's called Best Self-Co. And she's got this relationship journal.

Starting point is 00:06:51 And for the longest time, we still do it. We would meet once a week on Friday. And we would document where we are according to our goals. And it's pretty successful. So anyway, that's how I look at my marriage. I take it, like, I do two things that are kind of odd, but I think it works. We kind of operate it like a business force. There's like, I remember when we were getting married, you have to like meet with the priest ahead of time.

Starting point is 00:07:16 And we were like, yeah, we have the same values. We have the same this. And he was like, well, do you guys love each other? And we're like, yeah, dude, obviously. Like, of course. So, like, I want to acknowledge that like, this sounds like really regimented. But there's like all that love. And the important stuff is totally obviously there.

Starting point is 00:07:31 That's the most important thing. But logistically, we do a really good job of, like, outlining what we want to achieve together as a family for the next quarter and the next year and the next 10 years. And then we do a really good job of, like, checking in weekly and monthly to discussing, like, are we happy with how things are going? What do we need to change and things like that? And I think it works really well, like learning how to do these,

Starting point is 00:07:54 having these conversations. It was actually kind of hard, but I think it works. So that's my tips for successful marriage, but honestly a successful any relationship. I've got a lot of relationships. Sean and I, you know, the less popular co-hosts is this podcast. Him and I have had a relationship for 10 plus a years now, and it's fairly harmonious. Well, it is very harmonious. A bunch of my coworkers I've worked with now for six, seven, eight, nine, ten years.

Starting point is 00:08:23 So it mostly works pretty good, these types of check-ins and conversations. So anyway, that's my small amount of tips for having a good marriage.

My First Million - One Question Friday: How Do I Keep Relationships Healthy When I Work Long Hours?

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