I read an interesting article in The Wall Street Journal by a man named Emil Barr. He is a 22-year-old fellow who points out something that is pretty obvious, but rarely stated so forthrightly: Work-Life Balance Will Keep You Mediocre.
Yikes. Did he really say that? Am I agreeing with it and repeating it? You bet.
Let me explain, but before I give advice to the younger generation, let me say a word to you who are a bit older. As you read this, I suspect you will either be chagrined that you didn’t do at least some of what this fellow – and I – advocate. Or you will recall that you did exactly this, and it is probably one of the reasons for the great success you are enjoying today.
Basically, the theme of the article from Emil is that you should seek financial freedom in your future by optimizing ruthlessly during your peak physical and cognitive years, which are somewhat before you hit age 30.
The article is interesting to read, as this fellow has determined to:
- Work like a driven maniac – he says he lived on Red Bull, gained 80 pounds, and essentially killed himself. Others call this unsustainable, but he calls it front-loading success.
- Outsource everything non-essential, which includes paying third parties to do everything that is less valuable than his time, i.e., paying cleaning people, paying to skip grocery shopping, etc.
- Prune Social Networks, by which he means deciding if friendships and other things are worth the time commitment versus his goal of optimizing wealth building.
- Optimize academic life, which he means by going to classes only if they are relevant to his business life.
- Adopt a zero-base calendar, by which he means that all appointments have to be justified versus his business commitments.
- Optimize transportation with his theory of not wasting time on travel and paying extra if he could work during travel time.
He admits this almost destroyed him physically and emotionally. But his point is that a work-life balance would doom him to a life of mediocrity.
Okay – this fellow is kind of nutso, right?
But I look back on my life, and perhaps revealing too much:
- In college, I worked with a frenzy. I did a triple major in 3 years. I optimized by taking classes where I could get an A and pruned classes where I couldn’t. I graduated top of the class and got into Harvard Law School as a result.
- As a lawyer, when I started my law firm, I worked myself almost to death. Seven days a week – mostly averaging two to three hours of sleep during the week, working all weekend, and then panicking on Sunday night and getting a head start on the next week at midnight before Monday. This resulted in me gaining close to 50 pounds, looking like death, and at one point, checking into a hospital, thinking I was having a heart attack.
- I paid for a driver for a while so I could work while getting to work. At other times, I commuted by train and worked on the train 100% of the time, even if I was standing room only.
- I gave up my personal life for years. And I took a much bigger risk than Emil since I already had friends, a wife, and kids. Thankfully – and luckily -- they were there when I was done with the career-building frenzy.
Basically, I did what this young fellow did, although my chance to really pull it off was at age 40 and not age 20.
I realized at the time that I had a major chance for success and was grabbing it no matter what it cost me, including my health, my marriage, and my very life itself. I didn’t think as analytically as Emil, but I was instinctively doing the same thing.
Yes, we both risked our health, and things could have gone really wrong, but hopefully not.
Okay, okay, okay – take a step back from the brink. I don’t mean to advocate Emil’s and my insanity.
But believe me when I say that he – and I – are onto something. Let me dig a bit deeper.
First, to be truly great at anything, you have to give it 100%. I mean, really give it 100%. That means it is a passion – a fever – and that nothing else matters to you while you are blasting ahead. It has to be an all-consuming endeavor – the first thing you think of when you wake up and what you dream about as you go to sleep. If you want to be great, that is the price. I know this to my core and have lived my life this way, as I have sought greatness a bunch of times, but only achieved it rarely.
Second, contrary to the foregoing, you don’t have to want to be great in the first place, and this is a critical point. There is no law telling everyone to pursue greatness. Indeed, for all of us, we don’t even try to be great at 99% of the things that we are doing. The great athlete who may not care about academics is an obvious example. I want to be great at the real estate “stuff”, but accept pathetic mediocrity at the tech “stuff,” for example. So, the key lesson is that each of us gets to decide how important greatness is and also to determine which endeavors greatness should be pursued. Maybe your greatness is climbing all seven tallest peaks of the world, and you are fine with career mediocrity. That is just fine.
Third, for me at least, contra the contra again, there is no greater feeling than having achieved greatness at anything. Whether it is a sport or an instrument or a career, or whatever, the feeling of pervasive wonderfulness is, well, great.
Fourth, the point I make – and I think Emil is making – is that you cannot have your cake and eat it too, if you don’t mind a cliché. This means that you are making a key choice when you put work-life balance ahead of work during the early years of your career. It means that, although you may be choosing greatness in another endeavor, you are not choosing greatness in your career but instead choosing mediocrity.
To be super clear here – there is nothing at all wrong with that decision. I am in no way telling everyone they should pursue career success with the ferocity that Emil and I are doing.
The only thing I think is wrong is living in fantasyland by pretending to yourself that you will achieve career greatness if you pick work-life balance too early in life. You might get lucky, it is true, but you cut the odds dramatically.
So, to conclude, if you want to have a career that is not mediocre, the best way to get there is by working your butt off when you are young enough to do this and you have the stamina to pull it off.
Of course, Emil – and I – are kind of nuts – I guess totally nuts – and that doesn’t necessarily mean you should be too. It is, after all, your decision.
Before I end this, I swing back to talking to you, “older guys”, who are interacting with younger ones. This is the time to reflect on how you got where you got, and maybe tell the youngsters some war stories….
Bruce, aka The Real Estate Philosopher