We are all guilty of trying to be perfect in all aspects of our lives—including marriage, children, friendships, family, work, and hobbies. However, trying to be the best, all at once, can have severe consequences on our mental health.
It is human nature to want to be good at whatever we are doing. When we are young, our parents tell us to be good at school. We then strive to get straight As and get into college. Somehow we tie our work ethic into what someone else believes it to be. We empowered the teachers to tell us how hard we are working and what level of success we can achieve.
Then we hit the workforce, eager to “make it” into the world. We take the same mentality from school, that our boss knows best, and apply it to our jobs. We give our boss the final say on how we are performing, and they dictate how much we need to work.
Don’t Let School Interfere with Your Education
Part of becoming an adult is getting married. Many of us don’t know anything about a real marriage. Our parents are tight-lipped about what marriage really entails, so we are shooting in the dark when we pick a spouse. We look to the movies for guidance on how marriage should be, which can get us into trouble.
Going down the list of life, kids are next. Now it is time to be the perfect father or mother. Every step of the way, we make parenting harder than it needs to be by proving how outstanding we are as parents.
Along the way, our family members (parents and siblings) start to fall apart. You’ll notice the ones who struggle the most get the most attention. Over the years, they continue to work and struggle while you are off trying to win employee/father/mother/husband/wife of the year.
Finally, you believe that people who say they are your friends are actually your friends. You want to be there for them through their hardships, but they always seem to be in some kind of poor situation. Your conversations always tend to focus on what they have going on, never about your life.
JOMO, The Joy of Missing Out
On top of all of this madness, you add into the mix Social Media, and it messes everything up. For some reason, people believe that pictures mean a thousand words. We now want to compare ourselves and our lives to others. Everyone else seems so happy all the time. Their spouse is always by their side; their family is always on a boat or vacation, they always have tons of friends around them, they have time to have a hobby, etc.
When you add all this into the blender in your brain, you can make a mental soup. There is no right or wrong, only what we perceive to be true. The final nail in the coffin is the words “You deserve to be happy.” I don’t know where these words came from, but they need to go back into the bottle and be thrown into the sea.
The words “You deserve to be happy” are the most dangerous words to our work-life balance. These words tell us that everything is supposed to go our way. When we work hard, we will get that promotion. Why? Because we deserve it. Our marriage will magically work out perfectly. Why? Because we deserve it. Our kids will grow up to be rock stars. Why? Because they deserve it.
I Live Paycheck to Paycheck
The problem with these words being thrown together is that we don’t have the definition of “happy.” Therefore, we can’t conceptualize the idea of “being happy.” So if we don’t know what “happy” is and can envision being happy, how can we deserve “to be happy.”
All of these seem like psycho-babble until you start to see it unfold in real life. Now that I am forty, every day, something new develops. People my age are losing their minds. People that are unhappy in their marriages are cheating on their spouses. Children need to seek medical attention because they are not happy, and many people are on pills to fix their happiness issues.
Somehow our happiness has become mixed into the same category as material items. This combination of happiness via material stuff is the number one thing keeping us from work-life balance. Materialism is destroying our ability to form deep, lasting, meaningful, and impactful relationships. Relationships are the only reason we are on this earth.
Why do we exist? What is the meaning of life? What is the purpose of life? These are all questions that can be answered with the answer, “to form meaningful relationships.” Indeed, the only way to live forever is to form a relationship so strong that someone remembers you. That person will pass your memory on to others.
Everything else in life is a derivative of building meaningful and impactful relationships. American families used to be entrepreneurs with family-run farms and businesses. The parents and children worked together on these businesses, thus keeping relationships tight throughout the years. Then, during the industrial age, we left our families to move to the cities.
Become CEO of Yourself
This timeframe is when we started to work the five-day workweek. No longer could we go back to the farms to visit family. We began to use the phone to contact our families back home. We grew apart.
Now that we are in the city, we need to have a nice apartment. A nice apartment needs nice furniture, and why not add in a nice car as well. Now it is time to find a spouse. I hope they like nice things as well. So, now we need a nice wedding, a nice home, two nice cars, some nice dogs.
When our children are born, they need nice things because “they deserve to be happy.” Their friends have nice things, so our kids need nice things. With all of this “niceness” going around, both parents need to work. Not only work, but they need to get promoted as well—having nice things costs money.
4 Steps to Become Rich
Who has time to form meaningful relationships when we continually upgrade our lifestyles to reflect the latest and greatest stuff? It is all a shell game, and the person who keeps playing it loses.
There is no way to win this game of “stack the stuff.” The more we play it, the more control our boss has over us. They know we want that promotion, and they will make it difficult for us to get it because they don’t have a work-life balance either.
So, how do we address this misappropriation of time and money and get our work-life balance on track? The first thing I can tell you, in scientific terms, is “it’s all bullshit!” Work is only important because it pays expenses (and buys assets), we only need the stuff to get us from point A to point B, and friends won’t be there when you need them.
If you are trying to find meaning at work, well, I have some beachfront property to sell you in Arizona. I am not telling you to become a dirtbag at work, but you need to understand your purpose. Your purpose at work is to invest in assets fast enough to stop working. You need to get in, start working, grinding, obtaining assets, and get out.
Once you retire from the workforce, then you will have time to do meaningful, fulfilling work. You can start a business, write books, or build a farm. Working for a boss will destroy your soul.
Getting married is the best thing that I have ever done in my life. Staying married for 15+ years and counting is my number one achievement in my life, more so than doing 22 years in the military. However, my wife and I have a meaningful, impactful relationship that will last for generations.
The Truth about Discretionary Income
We are not materialistic. That doesn’t mean we don’t buy nice things from time to time, but these things don’t drive us. They are a by-product of our success, not why we succeed. We are successful and push ourselves because we have the same vision of our future.
Our vision is to be on the beach (maybe the white sand of Florida or a beach in Turkey) with our kids and grandkids. We will all be laughing and playing together. We won’t have a care in the world. Now, my wife and I have to separate objectives on achieving our goal and reaching our destination.
Kristina focuses on keeping the relationships with the kids tight. We will also need to stay close with their spouses as well. When the grandkids come, we need to be heavily involved with them from the start. Yes, there will be many personalities to contend with, but that is the part of life we should be focusing on. In the end, we will all be together because it is our number one priority.
From our shared vision, I deduce that it will cost a lot of money. Wherever we end up in retirement, keeping the family together will be a financial nightmare unless we are rich. Make no mistake about it; being rich is a must to keep your family together and moving forward. That is just the way life shakes out.
Don’t Gamble Your Retirement Away 2
So, I am intensely focused on becoming richer and richer every day. I have no urge to spend money, but because life is full of unknowns and question marks—money will help solve these issues as they arise.
I also am not worried about getting rich via a job; that is madness. Someone else controls your time and money. No, to get rich, I have become an investor and a creator. I manage how to spend my money and time.
Our work-life balance has never been better. We understand that our 40s are the best time to grind away and become rich. Building huge sums of passive income are the best way to ensure our family stays close and we can build meaningful and impactful relationships.
Become CEO of Your Life
So, in short, to achieve work-life balance, we need to do three things: convert materialism to minimalism, focus on passive income and retirement, and build meaningful and impactful relationships.
If we can attempt to work on these three objectives every day, we will not fail. It is not about being perfect; there is always a bright shiny toy that we will want. In fact, I saw the new Ford Lightning truck the other day. But we can strive to do things for the right reason. For example, we are becoming rich to ensure our time with family.
In part two, I will get into the particulars of how we can work towards our three objectives. We can set goals in each and start to achieve a work-life balance. We can achieve a balance, but our focus has to shift away from stuff and to people. See you in part two and Good Luck!
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Disclosure: I am not a financial advisor or money manager, and any knowledge is given as guidance and not direct actionable investment advice. I am an Amazon Affiliate. Please research any investment vehicles that are being considered. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it. I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.
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