The Truth About Needing Work Life Balance To Be Successful

Do you think work life balance is real or something that should be aimed for? Whatever you genuinely think, I want you to hold that thought.

Because I wanna go over which approach will help you more with actually hitting your bigger than life goals.

First, Where did all of this work life balance belief and life style come from?

Work life balance really became a thing in the past 50 years, before then, no one cared about it or even gave it any thought. There was no concern or thought to burn out, stress, over working, or pleasures.

But today it seems that this is what everyone is focuses on, burn out, stress, over working and over indulgence in pleasures. This is honestly why so many, I believe, have depression, and are so underachieving. We’re neglecting temporary pain for short term gratification.

Which then leads us to longterm pain. Partying away your young years, over spending for ego, and staying complacent/stuck in life.

My belief and personal life choice is not working 24/7. You don’t need to do that to be successful, at least after the beginning…

And still you don’t need to work 12/7 for 5 years and then be set free from ever working.

When I first started my business I was working 9-10 hours a day, 6-7 days a week and profiting $>0 —400 a week…

In my second year of business I was working 6-7 hours a day, 4-5 days a week, and profiting minimum $800 a week. And what I realized is that in that first year of business, 50% of my time was on the wrong thing.

Now you could argue that the second year I only did better because I knew my mistakes, and thats true. But I wasn’t prioritizing learning more my first year. I just had one belief and stuck to that which was. “Issa, you just need to work more.”

And my second year, I didn’t drop the work hard mentality. But I knew I needed to work smarter. Which is a big part in this work-life balance fugazzi.

Why Are we taught to ‘believe/prioritize work life balance’?

I’m about to talk about some conspiracy so please put on a tin foil hat, if you don’t have one, pretend like you’re wearing this one.

I know a lot of people who don’t go about work the way I was talking about it, who can only talk about ‘balance is the ultimate key in life’ and who don’t have what they want.

My belief is that work life balance was introduced for a reason. To make you ok with doing unmeaning-full work for money. Because money is what we need to survive.

Most people that I hear talk about balance in life and work are those who work jobs they don’t like. Because everyone I know who does something they care about doesn’t complain about work, all they do is “work” because it’s not even work. They want to do the thing.

The people who are in their jobs only have about 2-3 hours a day to start something or work on another project. So by saying to people that you need to have an equal balance of life, people won’t work on something new that they actually care about. Therefore they are forever trapped in this daily cycle of:

• Wake up

• Work

• Relax

• Repeat

Also when you are in a constant repeat of life, it limits your creativity and it normalizes this cycle in your mind. And when your work takes care of all your financial needs and some wants it makes you complacent. You no longer want more and instead you just continue with this until your ‘retirement’ comes.

The reason as to why media owned by big corporations are pushing this is because when you have a class of workers, it’s more profitable for them.

This isn’t me saying to quit your job by the way. But know that if you really want to live a meaningful life (assuming your work doesn’t do it for you) you need to spend that free time working on something different.

What should I do?

Tin foil hat moment over. 😞 

Work Smarter

Working smarter is getting more output for your input. Me spending 4 hours of my day training a novice salesman and then spending the last 5 on doing the work with my guys wasn’t helping nor practical.

My second year, I overloaded training on one salesman/worker for 2 days and had another friend help train the other days so as soon as they stopped training they could work properly even without my help. Which would then free up my time to help everyone with a more team approach. That’s one example of smarter work.

Say you don’t have a team but you still wanna work smarter. The way I went and go about it: you need longer smart work hours. Please don’t be one of those people who only work 4 hours a week. (Unless it’s all the time you can spare because of school or a current job.)

If you have 1 hour a day to do only cold emails, make the most of it. It makes more sense and is more profitable to send 6 personalized email where your potential customer gets a personalized message and free gift, etc over sending 60 generic emails to potential customers.

Don’t work less, but do more in that time. And doing more does not mean quantity, it means quality.

Every time I spoke to a potential customer and I didn’t compliment them, personalize anything, speak on specific benefits, or try and be personable my closing rate would plummet.

Time and energy

Something that I hear a lot from people that I’ve mentored or trained, is “don’t I save more energy and get more results if I do a generic action on a greater scale instead of using more brain power on less inputs?” No.

It’s the same thing in the gym. When you push to failure on every set, you get greater results. Overtime. The goal isn’t to be rich today, it’s to be rich tomorrow.

Whenever I spend more time today and really maximize the work load it results to easier input for the same type of work next month. Because if you’re gonna spend the next hour doing something, you might as-well make the most of that something in that hour.

And I know it’s easier to just mentally check out and just do work based on repetition, muscle memory or just to hit a certain number. But when you really push for that last rep, use a lot of mental power on one email, or really try and think about ‘what the other person’ prioritizes that hour becomes worth so much more.

The time doesn’t change, the action changes in that time. That is smart work.

If you don’t push for that hour to work on your bigger than life goal and save energy, ask yourself “where does that energy get spent?”

Regardless of what you do with your energy, it’s going to reload. And what I’ve noticed is that when you do spend a lot more energy, you as a result work out your brain (in a way) and you get even more energy tomorrow and your mental threshold increases for the next time you do that same activity.

So don’t worry about over-working yourself in the moment, because in the grand scheme of everything it won’t matter nor affect you as much as you believe.

All in All

It’s a good thing to put more effort into your ultimate goal which is most likely a business or something that will be able to financially take care of you and maybe others around you as well.

So continue to work on your bigger than life goal (or start) and focus only on what you want, not what others tell you to want.

Thank you for reading, and have an amazing day:)

The most important part of my success was learning from those ahead of me, and if you’d like the same guidance check this out: https://issafard.com/mentorship

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