When it comes to success, the truth is, there’s no magic bullet.🤷

Instead, it’s all about compromise.👌

At the heart of success sits a paradox:

To become great, you need to intensely focus on becoming the best at your craft…🧐

But you also need to accept that perfectionism is a liability that will hold you back from greatness.

I didn’t understand this until I launched my first health supplement company.

We were about a year in, and the company was struggling…

And I realized that even though I’d built a team…

They weren’t empowered to make any decisions without me.

This came to a head when I left the office to attend a music festival with some friends.

It was the first vacation I’d taken since starting the company…

And I was gone for less than 36 hours when suddenly, I started getting urgent Slack messages from my employees…📩

Reporting how two of our senior leaders were openly shouting at each other in the halls.📢

The situation was so bad that I was forced to cut my trip short, fly back, and then read both of those people the riot act…

And I can’t even describe how MAD I was when this happened.

“What’s wrong with these people?”

“Why can’t they just figure it out on their own?”

“Why do they need ME to be the arbitrator all the time?”

And that’s when it hit me…

This entire conflict wasn’t their fault…

It was MY fault.

All of it.​​

These two “leaders” had never actually been empowered to make their own decisions or allowed to own the consequences of those decisions…

So as soon as I left…

There was an instant vacuum, and it got filled with chaos.

I had to fix that, and so I did.

The following month when I traveled to multiple industry events across the U.S…

I was better prepared.✅

I told my employees they were empowered to own and make decisions, and that I would support them no matter what.

Then I left.

At first, it was really hard not to get involved…

My team would be having conversations around big decisions in Slack, and all I wanted to do was jump in and just solve the problems for them…

But I refrained.

I realized that if I kept doing that, they would never be able to make decisions on their own…

So instead, I just observed…

And sure enough, something remarkable happened:😮

About 70% of the time, the team arrived at the same solution I would have recommended…

About 20% of the time, they came up with a solution that was different than what I would have recommended, but that still made sense and that I thought would work…

And about 10% of the time, they came up with a solution that I vehemently disagreed with.

Even for that last 10% of the time though – their “wrong” decision usually ended up either being fine, or the consequences of it weren’t at all disastrous…

And it was only perhaps 1 out of every 100 decisions where I needed to jump in and say “no, we’re doing it this way instead.”

It was incredible…

Suddenly, almost overnight, I was “free” from my business…

It was growing without me…

And I had way more time-freedom than I’d experienced in years.

Now you may be wondering, what does this have to do with work-life balance and family?

Well, it’s pretty much the same principle applied to my life today.

If I didn’t want to be an involved father, or a devoted husband, I could be WAY more productive than I am…

I wouldn’t skip out on writing daily emails to my list…

I’d probably have already written some books…

I could have grown my various businesses even more…

Maybe I’d be richer than I am.

But at what cost?

At the cost of no relationship with my daughter, who is literally the brightest light in my entire life?

At the cost of a fraying, deteriorating marriage to my dear wife? One where we’re like two strangers living in the same house?

H*** no.

The reason I appear to have a great balance in my life is because of compromise…

And because there actually IS a balance.

Imagine a seesaw…

Family on one side, work on the other…

I try to keep things in as much equilibrium as I can.⚖

It’s not perfect, sometimes one side drops and the other rises…

But that’s the goal.🎯

For many people…

I think when they talk about “balance,” what they really mean is that they wish they could have their cake and eat it too.

But that’s not balance. That’s something different. That’s being superhuman. And it’s not realistic.

So yeah, my life is actually a series of compromises on both sides…

With the goal of maintaining balance as much as possible.

This means that most mornings, I drive my daughter to school, even though I could get a lot more done if I had my wife or a “nanny” do it…

But then some mornings, like today, I stay home to write my daily email and prepare for a podcast I’m going on (even though I’ll miss that time with my daughter).

It means picking my daughter up from school most days too, even though that cuts my work time short…

But it also means not feeling guilty when I take a solo trip for “deep thinking”.

It’s all about balance…

And then lastly, it’s also about having the right people, in the right positions, and making sure they are empowered.

My call center in Vegas has doubled in revenue every single year since 2017, and I spend less than an hour per week in that business…🎧

But that’s only because I’ve got a great CEO, COO, and entire org structure that runs without me.

That’s really my formula for success…🏆

And I wanted to share.

 

– SPG

P.S. This post originally came from an email I sent to my private list. If you want to see more stuff like this from me, you can apply to join my list using this link