885 The Power of Counterbalance

IT’S NEVER GOING TO BE PERFECT. We all have this vision of the ideal life. We work hard and get everything done. All of our relationships are in great shape. We take time to exercise and eat right. But the truth is, there is no magical destination. And even if we reach that place, it could all be destroyed in an instant by one of life’s famous curveballs. Instead of looking at balance like a happily ever after, look at it as something you constantly need to reevaluate and adjust. For this Five Minute Friday, I revisited a conversation I had with Jay Papasan where he shared his philosophy of counterbalance. Jay Papasan is the co-author of The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results. He wants you to be purposeful about the way you spend your time. Learn how to tackle the myth of work/life balance in Episode 885. In This Episode You Will Learn: About work/life balance and if it’s possible (02:00) Why balance is a verb, not a noun (02:30) How to counterbalance (03:00) If you enjoyed this episode, check out the video, show notes, and more at http://www.lewishowes.com/885 and follow at instagram.com/lewishowes Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

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

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is Five Minute Friday.

• 0:10Lewis Howes?

  The person that I'm bringing you on today, his name is Jay Papasan. And he talks about the one thing that you can do that will accomplish more by doing less, okay? Now, this guy Jay Papasan is an interesting guy, and I think you're gonna love this interview. He worked as an editor for Harper Collins for a while. Then he co-authored the bestselling series Millionaire Real Estate with Gary Keller, who's co-founder of Keller Williams Realty, one of the top real estate agencies in the country. He now runs a top residential real estate team in Austin. Recently co-authored The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results, which is a Wall Street Journal, Amazon, and New York Times bestselling author.

• 0:53Lewis Howes?

  And The One Thing is a book for busy people who are just spinning their wheels and not getting anywhere fast.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  There's a graphic that, you know, we created for the book, and I can't even remember who made it in, but it's this idea of work-life balance. And that's an incredibly new phenomenon that we've even identified that as a problem. I don't think that, you know, serfs back in medieval times worried about their work-life balance, right? This actually showed up in the 80s. And a lot of that has been really exacerbated by the fact that cell phones and smartphones, there's no barriers between when we're at work and when we're at home. And that happened really rapidly. And you can see, like, the year the BlackBerry came out, the number of times that showed up in popular literature just goes through the roof. And it actually peaks with the iPhone.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  So I think that I love all the tools we have to be entrepreneurs from home and to not have to be renting and have the expense of an office, but we have to also have an adaptation to know when are we at work, when are we doing our work, and when are we at home and living our lives? And I think that that's a, that's a big challenge for us right now.

• 2:09Lewis Howes?

  Do you think work-life balance is possible, or is that a way, are we supposed to be having a balance in work and life?

• 2:17Speaker 01

  You know, that's one of the lies that we identify in the book. It's actually being sold to us as a destination. This idea, then we just get our life just really organized. It's all gonna fall into place. And we'll have a great relationship with our kids and our spouse and with, you know, our work relationships and it'll all be just like Nirvana. And it's actually a verb. And it's something that you have to do actively. Um, that was like a big aha. It's a big point that I try to make. A lot of the people we work with every day are female entrepreneurs. And I think they have it doubly hard, right? They're trying to balance a strong obligation to family. Um, they often neglect their personal life completely to take care of family and work.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  And so this idea that there's a Nirvana out there, it's a disservice. It makes us think that other people are succeeding, um, when they're not. So it's just something you actively do.

• 3:12Lewis Howes?

  So, I mean, so what I'm hearing you say is that work-life balance is not possible. Is that right?

• 3:18Speaker 01

  I think that is absolutely correct. Um, that's the way we come at it. I think that a huge business, a hugely successful business is by nature gonna be a little bit messy. And if you're focusing on your one thing, like we talk about in the book, you're gonna be neglecting a lot of the little things.

• 3:33Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  I think that's okay, to be out of balance professionally. But you can't neglect your health. You can't neglect your key relationships. You can't neglect your spirituality. If you neglect those things for too long, you're gonna have a real problem, a profound problem. It might derail the work that you've done. We want people to be purposeful about it. And if I go into it, like there's an event we do every year where we host about 14,000 people over one week. And it's a grueling, you know, period of time working up to it. That week itself is really tough. I'm kind of an introvert, so I'm like, you know, and, and, and mobs of people for a week. And you just go into it knowing I've got to counterbalance. And that's kind of the word we introduce.

• 4:15Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Is that you're gonna consciously, it's okay to get out of balance, especially with work, but you've got to immediately counterbalance. You can't, you know, say, all right, you know, when this business goes public, I will go back and help them out. That might be too long, right? You might've neglected things for too long for that to work. So it's a regular sort of attending to those things so they never get too far out of balance.

• 4:51Lewis Howes?

  Hey guys, if you enjoyed this inspirational clip from a past episode of the show, then you'll love the free book I'm giving away right now. It's called The Millionaire Morning. It includes some of my best tips for starting off your day with a millionaire mindset. Get your free copy at themillionairemorning.com and just pay shipping. Again, check it out right now, themillionairemorning.com.