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

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. ----- Links: * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ----- 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. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto * #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  Hey MFM, my name is Rob. How do I keep my marriage and other relationships healthy when I work long hours?

• 0:15Sam Parr?

  Alright, 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. 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 it 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 and we go, "Alright, we know this will can work,

• 0:58Sam Parr?

  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 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.

• 1:42Sam Parr?

  Lion, meaning I'm willing to work like and grind for many weeks, but then I want to take three or four weeks off a year or five 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 boy's 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.

• 2:24Sam Parr?

  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 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 want to 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, HubSpot wanted to buy us. And I go, they sent me a cold email and I 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.

• 3:06Sam Parr?

  Here's a Google Doc and it had, 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.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  This data is wrong every freaking time.

• 3:47Speaker 03

  Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  Whoa, I can see the client's whole history, calls, support tickets, emails. And here's a task from three days ago I totally missed. HubSpot, grow better.

• 4:03Sam Parr?

  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, 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 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 three kids, but like, give me a ballpark, like where your intentions are now. And I know they might change, but.

• 4:49Sam Parr?

  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 want to live? Oh, you want to live here? Let's go on Zillow right now. Well, that house is eight million dollars. So let's work backwards to like where, how much that, how are we going to 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 listed out all those things. It's like, look, for my twenties, business is going to come before, uh, 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 thirties, things like that.

• 5:30Sam Parr?

  And so we really just outlined like very specifically where we wanted to be in ten, twenty and thirty 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. 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 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, 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.

• 6:15Sam Parr?

  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, uh, 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 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. Uh, we, uh, would meet once a week on Friday and we would document where we are, you know, according to our goals and.

• 7:02Sam Parr?

  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 I 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 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 to discussing like, are we

• 7:46Sam Parr?

  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-hosts of this podcast, him and I have had a relationship for 10 plus years now, and it's fairly harmonious. Well, it 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.