How Gary V, Tony Robbins, Russell Brunson, & Elon Musk Balance (& Don’t Balance) Family & Entrepreneurship
The good, bad, and ugly
Written by Jake Hare.
When I started my journey into entrepreneurship I wish I knew how much of an impact it would have on my family.
I had assumed being young, naive, and full of moxy that I’d dive head first into startup life and my business would take off in a hurry.
Well, that didn’t happen.
So of course the inevitable balancing act of growing a business and maintaining a healthy family life ensued.
I was terrible at it.
I was glued to my computer screen constantly, only getting up to eat and sleep. I refreshed Twitter or Facebook every few minutes because the thought of missing someone interacting with my new business on social media was too much to bare. When I wasn’t working I hovered around my computer and cell phone like a flies on… well, you know. I just couldn’t stop.
Then I started wondering, how does any entrepreneur stop?
Even after my business took off and I could breath, or at least my bank account could breath, I was still out of balance. I learned that just because your business grows doesn’t mean the demand for your time and attention goes away.
Recently I decided to start looking at how some of the most compelling and successful entrepreneurs in the world balance business and entrepreneurship. Admittedly, as a father of two young sons I stuck to researching men because I was personally interested in how fatherhood played into that balance (or imbalance).
I found definite patterns. Now I’m writing about them.
So far I’ve found over 25 strategies the world’s most successful entrepreneurs use to balance family and business, and I’m sure I’ll uncover more in my research.
This post will show you the methods these four famous entrepreneurs use to balance (or not balance) family and entrepreneurship, followed by another five I personally use.
(NOTE: I’ve put together a bonus resource at the end of this post that will show you 10 more strategies you can implement immediately to balance family and entrepreneurship)
Gary Vaynerchuck
I’ll be honest.
When I first caught wind of Gary Vaynerchuk I wasn’t a fan.
He seemed pretentious, cocky, and overconfident.
And where the hell was his family? I mean, I know he had one, though he barely mentioned them, and his kids were my kids’ age, and I can’t take a selfie without them photobombing most days, yet Gary seems to jetset around the world without a care.
My dislike for Gary quickly turned into a realization that I was just envious, so I started doing some digging to see what his trick was to managing family life.
Gary posts nonstop, is always traveling, doing video, preaching, and hustling. I hadto know what his secret was to balancing it all.
Or maybe there was no balance. Maybe he just ignored his family.
Either way, I had to find out.
After some digging I came upon an answer Gary gave an interviewer in 2015 about how he manages family life.
“The way that I story tell my life vs. the way I story tell my private life are very different. And that’s very much intended. I play in extremes. My daughter had a recital a few weeks ago, and I was the first parent in line for it. On weekends, I am all in. 100%. I’m not playing 4 hours of golf. I’m not doing a lot of things other people are doing. I’m all in on the kids.”
He went on to say that the reason his kids aren’t floating around behind the scenes of his photoshoots or getting on during his Youtube videos is that he wanted it to be their choice. Gary made a conscious decision to keep his two worlds separate.
For Gary, that means Monday through Friday was time to hustle, and the weekends was his time to spend with his wife and kids.
Okay, now before you think ‘this sounds pretty obvious’ I want you to ask yourself two questions:
Are you REALLY time-boxing between business and family?
Chances are you think you are, like I thought I was, but meetings bleed over into family time, movie nights with the family turn into them watching the movie while you sit on your computer building a new landing page, and weekends are for worrying about Monday instead of living in the present.
Have you made a solid agreement with your spouse regarding your work?
Gary is able to do everything he does partially because him and his wife have discussed what his schedule will be like, and created a cadence that supports it with ground rules. By setting expectations upfront his family knows when and how they expect him to be involved.
Now, to be clear, I’m not asking you to live life like Gary V. If you want to then great, but what I really want is for you to create solid boundaries between your work time and family time, and then communicate that effectively with your significant other.
If you have kids, communicate the boundaries with them too. Trust me, you’ll regret you didn’t when you have a meeting to go to and your 8 year old asks why you work so much…
Tony Robbins
Tony is amazing. One of the most motivational human beings on the planet. He can make Ron Swanson smile.
When I started digging into what Tony does to balance family and business I realized how much the man travels. Suffice it to say, it’s a lot.
I can’t stand being in an airport more than a few minutes without wanting to bathe myself in hand sanitizer and curl up in the fetal position.
Tony is a pretty down to earth guy, so instead of telling people like you and me that ‘we need to just make more time for ourselves’ like most personal empowerment coaches do, he actually gives us a real tactic to use.
Tony thinks you’re wasting time.
He calls this ‘the time suck’. It’s all those hours in the day you’re wasting thinking about what to tweet, staring at your computer while you prepare to write a blog post, sit in line at Panera Bread for your favorite broccoli cheddar soup.
Sure, each of these things may just take up just a few minutes, but they add up.
How much? Well to figure that out Tony recommends you keep a ‘Time Suck Journal’ for 1 week. Get one of those little pocket journals and carry a pen with you, and every time you feel like you wasted a few minutes staring at a screen, refreshing a social media feed, had a meeting that should have been an email, whatever.
Then, drop the time wasters.
Staring at your screen too much? Restrict yourself to 1 or 2 times a day where you can check social media, and that means probably removing those apps from your phone.
Waiting in line for lunch or coffee? Order it before you get there, or have it delivered if you can.
Meetings that should be phone calls? Backhand the person who set up the meeting, that’ll stop them from setting it up again (no, just kidding, resist that overwhelming urge & instead see if someone else can take notes for you or politely ask for the meeting topic when it gets scheduled so you can do a preemptive meeting decline).
Alright, so start that ‘Time Suck Journal’ (and no, reading this article doesn’t count).
Russell Brunson
If you don’t know Russell by now you should. He grew his SaaS product Clickfunnels to $360M with no venture capital. Crazy. As someone who works with startups on a regular basis that kind of growth is unheard of unless you give up tons of equity for wads of cash to Silicon Valley investors.
Russell is also a pretty transparent dude.
In his podcasts and blog posts he’s always talking about his family, the issues they’re dealing with, and how his business successes (and failures) have been a huge undertaking for his wife and 5 young kids.
So what’s his secret to balancing it all? Well, the trick for Russell is he doesn’t.
He just goes with the flow.
There’s been countless times where you hear his wife or kids in the background, and his crazy popular podcast Marketing Secrets is often recorded while he drives his kids to or from school. He even had an episode recently where he paused and restarted the recording while he drove his kids house to house to handout church flyers.
No shame, and there doesn’t need to be.
Sometimes as entrepreneurs we’re way too hard on ourselves.
I remember feeling like I had to lock my kids in their room because having even a whimper on my podcast episode was ‘really unprofessional’.
Things don’t work that way anymore.
People value honesty and transparency, and sometimes that means having a little fun when family blends into business.
So, I know Russell’s approach is radically different from Gary V’s approach to balancing family and business. How do you know what’s right for you?
Depends on you. What makes you more comfortable? For Russell that means having his kids and wife all over the place, and his audience loves it. For Gary V that means time-boxing to keep business and family separated.
Two opposite approaches. Two approaches that are totally cool.
Elon Musk
Okay, when I found out Elon Musk had 6 kids the first thing I said was “Holy $h*t, no way!”.
After I looked it up for myself I decided to do some digging.
How does a guy who sends rockets to space AND builds the coolest electric cars AND is building some crazy underground tunnels AND is building solar power solutions for residential neighborhoods AND high-speed rail systems able to have time for kids?
Kind of makes a normal entrepreneur like me feel like a chump.
Until I found out he doesn’t do ‘dad’.
Elon has admitted several times that he’s not the greatest family man.
During interviews with reporters he’s admitted that he works 100 hours/week pretty regularly, and when he is with his kids he spends his time writing & responding to emails.
There was even a report that in 2015 he may have chastised an employee for missing a company event due to the birth of his child.
Musk is reported as saying “that is no excuse. I am extremely disappointed. You need to figure out where your priorities are. We’re changing the world and changing history, and you either commit or you don’t.”
Whoa.
Not to pile on, but Musk has also been divorced twice, and his exes haven’t said the most flattering things about how Musk balances his family and business.
So I’m sure you’re asking yourself why I included Elon in this.
Well, because Elon IS balancing family and business. He’s just decided to prioritize one dramatically more than the other.
I included Elon in this as a warning to you.
For as successful as you could be with all that work you do, ask yourself this one simple question:
Is it worth it?
Sure, Elon might send people to Mars, might give us all renewable energy, might give us a 20 minute trip from SF to NYC.
But his kids will only ever know him as that.
The guy who changed the world, but couldn’t find the time to change my diaper, or do my hair, or make my lunch.
So what kind of entrepreneur do you want to be?
One that’s able to balance family and business, or one that doesn’t even try?
Whoa, okay, enough with the heavy stuff.
How I Manage Family & Entrepreneurship
I’m going to get honest with you.
The first two years of running my business Launchpeer I was a terrible husband and father. I wasn’t trying to be, it just happened. See, my business wasn’t going well. My wife had to go back to work to help pay the mortgage while I became a stay-at-home-dad for our 6 and 4 year old boys.
During that time I stopped caring about anything except growing my business.
I got up early, stayed up late, gave my family just enough time to have them leave me alone for the rest of the day.
Then, because of things I did completely unrelated to the number of hours I was working or time I wasn’t spending with my family, our business took off.
That’s when I realized my business had become everything to me, and that’s not what I wanted.
Luckily the first step to fixing anything is realizing it’s not working.
So here’s the 5 things I did (and still do) to improve my family and business balance.
Go on a phone diet
So the first thing I did was removed all the social media apps I didn’t use, but just checked because I thought I should. I’m an avid Twitter user so I removed Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn from my phone to stop myself from ‘social switching’, which is the process of switching back and forth between social channels looking for new updates.
For example, here’s a shot of my home phone screen before the ‘diet’:
Here’s a shot of my home screen after the ‘diet’:
On the same note, I decided to turn off all push notifications on my phone except for missed calls (you know, like those little red badges you can’t help but check every time they popup). That way I wasn’t torn away from what I was doing just because of a random ping or icon.
Get outside every day
Each day I take a quick drive down to Charleston’s Harbor. It’s only about 15 minutes from my home and office, and I just get out of my car for 5–10 minutes and walk around looking at the water. I’d say this helps ground me, putting the world into perspective.
Can you blame me? Here’s a quick shot of Charleston harbor…
There’s nothing that makes you or your problems feel smaller than seeing how big the world can be, whether that’s by stargazing, staring out at the ocean, or taking a walk in the woods.
4 day work week (if you can)
This took a long time to get in the habit of, but it’s been amazing. I always take either Monday or Friday off. I don’t mean I take it off and spend it with my kids or spouse; remember, she has work and they have school.
No, instead I spend it doing whatever it is I want to do. Sometimes that’s working on my book, drawing, taking a peaceful drive, working in the yard, going kayaking, Netflixing, or whatever. Everyone needs a little time alone sometimes.
Block off time from 5–8pm
5–8pm is the time between my kids getting picked up from school and their bedtime. Between these times I put the computer away, turn my phone off, and focus completely on them. I’ll help them with homework, play video games with them, watch TV, talk about what’s going on at school, or anything else they want completely uninterrupted.
Naturally medicate
This is something my wife got me into. CBD oil. No, it’s not weed. It’s like all-natural anxiety reducer.
To caveat this, I’m not a doctor, and don’t recommend you take anything, I’m just letting you know what I do. It’s totally legal and most homeopathic stores sell it.
I take about 25mg per day and it helps me with my anxiety. I really don’t even notice it, and with such a low dose you have to take it for a few days to start feeling the effects, but once it kicked in for me it took longer to get irritable, my sleep schedule became more regular, I didn’t get stressed so easily by little things, and life just seemed a little easier.
Want to better balance family and entrepreneurship?
So far I’ve found 25 ways the most successful (and busy) entrepreneurs around the world manage family and business. These were just a taste.
If you’d like to learn 10 more strategies you can start using immediately to live a better life, have a happier family, all while growing a thriving business then click HERE for the free list.
Jake Hare is a former homeless teen, Army veteran, and serial entrepreneur. He is the founder of Launchpeer and Dadpreneur Club. His new book Founding Fathers launches Summer 2018. He’s a married father of two based out of Charleston, South Carolina.
