Transcript

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

A M F M. 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 ten Years plus and it's

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 the pots. Basically I've got this new thing I'm working on. And my co founder and I We did something interesting.

Yeah. 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 We're 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 will can work, but let's pump the bricks stop right now. And I want to have a conversation with you. And what I wanna know is a bunch of questions. And so I said I sent him up the same questions and I then I went and answered them on my s on my own. And it basically outline.

What so it uh 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. I want to be present in my future children's and current wife's uh life. current with you know what I mean?

Uh I wanna own a bunch of different uh real estate. I want fun and adventure. I wanna work hard, but I wanna work like a lion me lion meaning Uh I'm willing to work like in grind for many weeks, but then I want to take three or four weeks off. uh a year or five weeks off a year and I wanna 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 uh we each answered a question of ways that were uh 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 ten thousand employees. I don't want that. I'm not willing to have recurring meetings. Uh I'm not willing to do this or that. I am willing to work eighty 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 wanna aggressively scale it. Or that's what I said. I want to aggressively scale it. I wanna hit a hundred million dollars 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 wanna figure out right away if there's any deal breakers. And in fact, this is what I do did when I sold my company. I said, um

Hub is spot. Wanted to buy us. And I go 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 it ha 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 Party like marriages and business relationships and But 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 clients whole history. Call, support tickets, emails, and Here's a test from three days ago I totally missed. Let's spot grow better.

So my wife and I This sounds kinda 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 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 outline You know how like when people say they're like, Yeah, I wanna 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 Uh 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 wanna live? Oh, you wanna live here? Let's go on zillow right now. Oh that house is eight million dollars. So let's work backwards to like where how much that how we're gonna afford that house. Uh 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 list it out all those things. It's like look from my Uh twenties.

Business is gonna come before uh 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 uh get this other goal that we have that we're gonna have in our thirties. Things like that. And so we really just outlined like very specifically.

Where we want it to be in ten, twenty, and thirty years, and we did it exactly like a business where it was like Here's where we wanna 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 lives. um 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 it to get that hard stuff out of the way.

Another thing that we do, which is like kinda lame. But you know how a company has OKRs Uh, 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 um

Yeah. A 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 um 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 Cat. 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

In 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 I we kind of operate it like a business force like I remember when we were getting married the 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 you guys love each other? And we're like, yeah, dude, obviously, like of course. So like I wanna 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 ten years. Um 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 kinda 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. Him and I have had a relationship for Uh ten plus 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 six, seven, eight, nine, ten 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.