I coach real estate agents to stop chasing balance because it’s an illusionary dream that really won’t ever happen. A perfect work/life balance is just an impossible standard that cannot be achieved, but sure sounds good on therapy couches and social media. There may be people out there who think they have this perfect union of work and life, but I guarantee you that they still miss family functions, or don’t do the things they love to do as often as they would like. If they were honest with themselves they would see that. Some folks use the excuse “I love my work” to justify losing out on some other aspect of their lives.
I won’t go into the details here, but back in 2016 I changed my life from working 7 days a week to being “semi-retired” and only working 5 days a week, at the most. Since then I have established semi-normal days off, Fridays and Saturdays. I say semi-normal because in all businesses, and life, things happen and we need to change to accommodate a client, or a family member’s needs, etc. If something extraordinary comes up, like a $2m buyer flies into town and only has Friday available to look at beach houses, your damn right, I change my day off! But I don’t just skip it and work 6 or 7 days that week. I simply move my day off to another day. But most Fridays I’m on a boat, bass fishing, one of my favorite things to do.
I spent this past Thursday through Monday in the mountains of Northern California, hunting with my brother, my nephew, and old friends that we’ve hunted with since we were kids, back when we went every year. It’s very difficult to get drawn to hunt this particular area now and it’s been 7 years since our last hunt. I call it hunting, but I really don’t care if I get anything, that’s not why I’m there. Yes, I do try, but if it’s like this past weekend and there just wasn’t much to see, that’s ok. I truly enjoyed driving the same rough, dusty roads, that I have since I was a child. I have wonderful memories of riding on those roads with my Dad in his 1965 Scout, with the top off and dust flying everywhere. My brother, our friends, and I drove those same roads this past week, and walked the same mountains that not only we have walked for decades, but our fathers did before us. Every evening, when we were done hunting for the day, we sat around the camp and talked about those days back then, with our Dads, in the exact same camp, having the same conversations about what we saw that day, life, and what we were going to do the next day. My Dad has been gone for 17 years now, but some of the guys that were there this week are lucky enough to still have their Dads with them. They are in their 90’s now and can’t hunt, but they sure wish they could, as those were some of the best times of their lives, and still are for those of us who are lucky enough to still do it.
The last time my brother and I were drawn for that area, it was just the two of us. The other guys didn’t get drawn. It was in 2015 and I was so busy that I just went for one night, I left my brother to hunt it alone for the next two days. I was just “too busy.” I know he was disappointed in me, and I was disappointed in myself, but I justified it by the same old lie I always told myself, “I’m doing this for my family.” This year I took 5 days and blocked them off my calendar, explained to all of my clients that I will be out of town with no cell or internet. I would be back in touch with them when I returned. They all understood and were happy for me. We have one more weekend in the season and those days are blocked off as well. You never know, it may be another 7 years before we get drawn again, and the way life happens, you just never know if all of us will be able to be there again. Hopefully, 30 years from now there will be some other descendants of ours, sitting around that camp, talking about us the way we talk about our Dads, and the great times we’ve had there.
Living Life Unbalanced means that the scale leans toward you, your family, your friends, and making memories that last forever. That is the priority. Does that mean it is always tilted that way? Nope, sometimes you have to put just a little bit more weight on the other side of the scale. Maybe there’s a client who can only fly into town on a particular day, or maybe there is a very serious issue with a listing and you need to be there, these things happen. But the vital part is that as soon as that one situation is resolved, the scale tilts back to the real priorities in life, You, Your Family, Your Friends, and Lifelong Memories. The rewards are more than you could ever make monetarily.