One Question Friday: How Do I Keep Relationships Healthy When I Work Long Hours?

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 gonna reference something that I used to do. So basically I talked about this thing on this pod. So basically I've got this new thing I'm working on and my co-founder and I, we did something interesting that seems pretty obvious to me. But when I mentioned on 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. We go, all right, we know this can work, but let's pump the brakes, stop right now. And I want to have a conversation with you. And what I want to know is a bunch of questions. And so I said, I sent him the same questions and then I went and answered them on my, on my own. And it basically outlined what, so here are 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 a year. I want to be present in my future children's and current wife's, uh, life. Current wife, you know what I mean? Uh, I want to own a bunch of different, uh, real estate. I want fun and adventure. I want to work hard, but I want to work like a lion. Me, lion, meaning, uh, I'm willing to work like and grind for many weeks, but then I want to take 3 or 4 weeks off, uh, a year, or 5 weeks off a year. And I want to travel the world comfortably. 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, 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, here's what we want out of this business. We want to aggressively scale it, or that's what I said. I want to aggressively scale it. I want to hit $100 million in revenue in X amount of years. Like, so anyway, really specific. And then he answered this on his own and we came back together and we said, 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 do, did when I I sold my company, I said, HubSpot wanted to buy us. And I go, they sent me a cold email and they go, hey, we wanna talk about partnership. And I was like, I don't know what partnership means. Does that mean you wanna buy us? Just tell me right away. And they said, yeah, we wanna buy you. I said, cool, here's a Google Doc and it, I list out all the reasons why you don't wanna 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. 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, particularly 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 3 days ago I totally missed. HubSpot, grow better. So my wife and I, this sounds kind of lame because I don't want it to sound that my like business is so important to me that it like permeates into like my marriage, but in a way it kind of does. But basically like 2 months or 3 months into dating, I was like, hey, just so you know, or maybe it was 6 months, I was like, just so you know, like I, 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, we're on the same page. Um, and then we actually outlined— 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 3 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 on 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 on Zillow right now. Well, that house is $8 million. So let's work backwards 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, for my, 20s, business is gonna come before like relationships. So like meaning there's gonna be a lot of times that I'm not gonna be around when you need me, but that's because I'm gonna be dedicating a lot of time in order to get this other goal that we have that we're gonna have in our 30s, things like that. And so 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 OKRs, which stands for objectives and key results, and like you're supposed to set those quarterly. Annually, you have like an annual target and then like quarterly benchmarks. We do that for our life. And so we have an adventure one, we have a 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 where 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. Um, I use this journal that, uh, my friend started. Her name's Kat, uh, it's called, uh, uh, Best Self Co. And she's got this relationship journal. And for the longest time, um, we still do it, but we, uh, would meet once a week on Friday and we would document where we are, you know, according to our goals. And it's pretty successful. So anyway, um, that's how I look at my marriage. I, I take it like I do two things that are kind of odd, but I think it works is we kind of operate it like a business. Of course, there's like, I remember when we were getting married, you have to like meet with the priest ahead of time 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. That's the most important thing. But like 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, having these conversations that 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-host of this podcast, uh, him and I have had a relationship for, uh, 10+ years now, and it's fairly harmonious. Well, it is very harmonious. Um, a bunch of my co-workers I've worked with now for 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 years. Um, so it mostly works pretty good, um, these types of check-ins and conversations. So anyway, that's my small amount of tips for having a good marriage.