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

Hubspot Podcast Network Hubspot Podcast Network 10/14/22 - 10m - PDF Transcript

All right.

Quick break to tell you about another podcast that we're interested in right now.

HubSpot just launched a Shark Tank rewatch podcast called Another Bite.

Every week, the hosts relive the latest and greatest pitches from Shark Tank, from Squatty

Potty to the Mench on a Bench to Ring Doorbell.

And they break down why these pitches were winners or losers.

And each company's go-to-market strategy, branding, pricing, valuation, everything.

Basically all the things you want to know about how to survive the tank and scale your

company on your own.

If you want to give it a listen, you can find another bite on whatever podcast app you listen

to, like Apple or Spotify or whatever you're using right now.

All right.

Back to the show.

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.

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 pot.

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.

Let's do 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.

And so I said, I sent him up the same questions, and then I went and answered them 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 the year.

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, 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.

I want to travel the world comfortably.

I also said that I care about influence.

I said, I want to 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 and X amount of years.

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 did when I sold my company.

I said, I just wanted to buy us and they sent me 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?

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.

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.

So my wife and I, it sounds kind of lame because I don't want it to sound that my business

is so important to me that it like permutates into like my marriage, but in a way it kind

of does.

But basically 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, 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, awesome, 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

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 in Zillow right now.

Well, that house is $8 million.

So let's work backwards to like where, how much that, how are we 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 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 we really just outlined like very specifically where we want it 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 have 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.

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 we want to be financially.

Just 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 the best self-co and she's got this relationship journal and for the longest

time, we still do it, but we would meet once a week on Friday and we would document where

we are in 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 is 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.

And we were like, yeah, we have the same values.

We have the same this and we'll, 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 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.

Sean and I have had a relationship for 10 plus years now and it's fairly harmonious.

What is very harmonious, a bunch of my coworkers I've worked with now for six, seven, eight,

nine, 10 years.

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.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.

Episode #375: Sam Parr (@thesamparr) answers one listener's question about what they can do to keep relationships healthy when they work long hours.
To submit your question and hear yourself on My First Million, go to MFMPod.com and click on the circle with the microphone in the lower right hand corner.
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Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more.
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