The Compound #24: There is no such thing as a balanced Tuesday

It’s been a crazy week getting settled again in the UK. Jet lag was almost non existent but so much life admin to sort out.

I’m on my way to the airport, flying to Seattle for the start of a 12 day trip with 2 conferences and a Toucan Exec team offsite. Writing this from the back of a taxi.

This issue is going to be a bit different. I’ve been thinking about the concept of seasons a lot more recently so buckle up, this might be a long one.

I think we’ve completely fucked up the idea of balance.

We picture this perfect day where we’re supposed to show up perfectly to everything.

Wake up early. Train. Eat well. Be an amazing parent. Be an amazing partner. Smash work. Be an inspiring leader. Reply to every message. See your mates. Get eight hours sleep.

Then wake up and do it all again tomorrow.

Impossible.

There is no such thing as a balanced Tuesday.

And I don’t think there should be.

There are days where work gets nearly everything from me. There are other days where I train at 10am, have lunch with my family and do considerably less work than somebody following me on LinkedIn might imagine.

There are weeks where I feel like a brilliant dad and a slightly average CEO.

There are weeks where I’m completely locked into the business and training gets squeezed in at antisocial hours.

That isn’t failure.

That’s life.

The problem is that we keep measuring balance over completely the wrong timeframe.

“Life happens in seasons. The goal isn’t to make every day balanced. It’s to make sure the imbalance makes sense.”

When we were building Toucan in the early days, there were periods where the business needed a ridiculous amount of work.

The work needed doing.

So we did it.

And I don’t look back at that period thinking I had terrible work-life balance.

It was the right season.

The problem comes when you take something that worked in one season and turn it into your personality.

Working constantly might be exactly what is required when you have five employees.

That doesn’t mean you should still be doing it when you have forty.

Being involved in every client conversation can make you a brilliant founder at the beginning. Years later it can make you the bottleneck.

The behaviour that saves you in one season can screw you in the next.

I’ve felt that personally over the last few years.

I’ve had to step away from things at Toucan that I was good at. Things I enjoyed. Things where, if I’m being completely honest, I probably thought I could still do the job better than the person I was handing it to.

As a founder, being useful becomes part of your identity.

People ask you things. You solve problems. You know what’s going on.

Then you build a good leadership team and suddenly the objective is for fewer people to need you.

That is success.

Emotionally it can feel a little bit like being made redundant from your own company.

But if Toucan only works brilliantly when I’m in every conversation, I haven’t built a great business.

The season changed.

I had to change with it.

From the outside, it probably looked like the ultimate version of freedom.

Wake up in the sun. Coffee at Blacklist. Work. Train at Body Factory. More work. Spend time with my family. Run. Eat good food. Repeat.

There were random weekdays where I’d stop and think: this is ridiculous.

Ten years ago, if you’d shown me a photograph of that life and told me this was what I was building towards, I’d have signed immediately.

But freedom does not automatically make you free.

It just gives you empty space.

And if you’re wired like me, you’re very capable of filling every inch of it.

Business. Training. Content. Another target. Another thing to improve.

Then becoming a dad completely changed how I think about all of this.

Because some seasons don’t belong to you.

You don’t get to extend them because you were busy.

Cody will only be two once (yes I know this is the most obvious statement ever).

There will be a last time he asks me to pick him up. A last time he mispronounces a word in a particular way. A last time he wants me to sit on the floor and play some completely pointless game for an hour.

And I probably won’t know any of them are the last time when they happen.

That messes with me.

The business will always be there asking for something.

But no one sends you a reminder…

FINAL WEEK OF YOUR SON BEING TWO - PLEASE PRIORITISE ACCORDINGLY.

It just slowly disappears.

Ambitious people love saying they’re working hard for their family.

Sometimes we are.

But sometimes that sentence is just copium.

Sometimes you’re working because you love working.

Because winning feels good.

Because progress is addictive.

Because being needed makes you feel important.

Because you’re terrified somebody will overtake you if you take your foot off the accelerator.

And that’s fine.

But you need to own it.

Don’t spend twenty years missing your family and then call it sacrifice on their behalf.

That doesn’t mean family gets every hour of my life.

It doesn’t.

I want Cody to see me work. I want him to see me train. I want him to understand ambition. I want him to see that you can decide you want something difficult and then properly go after it.

But I also want him to remember I was there.

Those things aren’t mutually exclusive.

They just require me to understand what season I’m in.

Nobody sensible trains at maximum intensity twelve months a year.

You build. You peak. You race. You recover.

If a professional athlete tried to peak every week of the year, we wouldn’t call them committed. We’d call them an idiot.

Yet in business, being permanently “on” is still worn as a badge of honour.

No off-season. No recovery. No finish line.

Then everyone acts surprised when they’re completely burned out.

I love intensity.

I don’t want this to become an argument for living your whole life at 60%.

That sounds awful.

Sometimes I want the stupid goal. The horrible training block. The early morning. The risk.

Those periods make my life exciting.

Intensity isn’t the enemy.

Unconscious intensity is.

Going all in because you’ve deliberately chosen to is completely different from permanently being all in because you’ve forgotten there is another setting.

And there’s one phrase I think makes this particularly dangerous:

Just for now.

I’m working every evening, but just for now.

I’m not training, but just for now.

Me and my wife aren’t spending much time together, but just for now.

Sometimes that’s legit.

But if “just for now” lasts five years, I’ve got bad news…

That isn’t a season.

That’s your life.

An intense season needs an exit.

You need to know what you’re going all in on and, just as importantly, what you refuse to let silently drop to zero while you do it.

I love the concept of minimum viable everything. It normally applies to business but I think it can apply in life too.

If work goes mad, maybe my training isn’t perfect. But it doesn’t disappear.

If I’m deep in a training block, maybe I miss some social plans. But I don’t vanish from my friendships.

If my family needs more from me, maybe I’m not the first person online and the last person offline.

Keep the important plates spinning while one gets most of your attention.

Then rotate.

I’m increasingly convinced that a great and successful life is mostly deciding what deserves your obsession now.

And then having enough self awareness to notice when now has changed.

I still want a lot.

I want Toucan to become enormous. I want to build Twenty One. I want to get seriously good at Hyrox. I want to travel. I want incredible experiences. I want to look good, stay healthy and push myself.

I want more.

I just don’t want more of everything at exactly the same time.

That’s the difference.

I don’t want a perfectly balanced life.

I want a life where the imbalance is deliberate.

Where I can throw myself completely into something difficult without feeling guilty because I know why I’m doing it.

And where I can shut my laptop at 5pm on another day and think…

The email can wait.

Because sometimes the most important thing in my entire life is happening in the other room.