One Question Friday: How Do I Keep Relationships Healthy When I Work Long Hours?

hey m my name is rob how do i keep my marriage and other relationships healthy when i work long hours alright it's one question friday somebody asked a question about marriage i've been married for a few years i've been with my wife in a relationship for ten years plus and it's pretty great relationship someone was asking me for advice on it and i'm gonna reference something that i used to so basically i talk about this thing on this pod basically i've got this new thing i'm working on and my c founder and i we did something interesting that seems pretty obvious to me but when i mentioned on the podcast it surprised some people but basically we kind of like both had an idea that we wanted to work on and we were like cool like this is something i'm working i would like to work on would you like to work on and he said yeah whatever and so we got a little bit of attraction and we go alright we know this book can work but let's pump the brakes stop right now and i wanna have a conversation with you and what i wanna know is a bunch of questions and so i said i sent him the same questions and then i went and answered them on my on my own and it basically outlined what so here are the categories it was what do i want so financially i said what i want my personal net to be i said that i want to have freedom i want the ability to fly private i wanna live in different cities throughout the year i wanna be present in my future children's and current wife's life current wife you know what i mean i wanna own a bunch of different real estate i want fun adventure i wanna work hard but i wanna work like a lion lion meaning i'm willing to work like in grind for many weeks but then i wanna take three or four weeks off a year or five weeks off a year and i wanna travel the world comfortably i also said that i care about influence i said i wanna see at the big boys table and for people to think that i'm really good at my job and so i just said like here's like what i want in life then i we each answered a question of ways that were ways in which we want to get to where we want to go so basically things we're willing to do and i said i'm willing to do this i'm willing to do this and i'm willing to do this like i'm i'm not willing to hire ten thousand employees i don't want that i'm not willing to have recurring meetings i'm not willing to do this for that i am willing to work eighty hours a week am willing to put this first above every other project i have things like that and then finally we said like here's what we want out of this business we wanna aggressively scale it or as what i said i wanna aggressively scale it i wanna hit a hundred million dollars in revenue and x amount of years like so anyway really specific and then he answered this on his own and we came back together and we said alright let's see where we align where we don't align because i wanna figure out right away if there's any deal breakers and in fact this is what i do did when i sold my company i said hubspot wanted to bias and i go they sent me an cold email and like hey wanna talk about and i was like i don't know what partnership means does that mean you wanna bias just tell me right away and they said yeah we wanna buy you i said cool here's a google doc and it i've list out all the reasons why you don't wanna bias us and where we stink if that list is okay with you talk to me again and so they said yeah we're okay with everything on this list it's none a it's that bad and we said alright cool let's keep talking and so anyway my point is is i've learned with relationships throughout the years predict like marriages and business relationships and with my partner or hubspot and you wanna get the difficult conversations out the way early on because that will literally save you a decade of heartache and with my marriage i did the same thing this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hotspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrate well i can see the client's whole history calls support tickets emails and here's a test from three days ago i totally missed hot hubspot grow better so my wife and i sounds kinda lame because i don't want it to sound that my like business is so important to me that it like perm mutate until like my marriage but in a way it kind of does but basically like two months or three months into dating i was like hey just so you know or maybe it was six months i was just you know like i i see us going places and like being together for a very long time and potentially marriage is that what you see and she was like yeah was like awesome we're on the same page and then we actually outline you know how like when people say they're like yeah i wanna like have a nice house with kids and all this stuff i was like alright let's get really specific tell me how many kids do you think you want you don't need like tell me you want exactly three kids but like give me a ballpark like where your intentions are now and i know they might change but give me like a ballpark on where they are okay great now how much money do you wanna make each year okay cool where do you wanna live oh you wanna live here let's go in zillow right now oh that house is eight million dollars so let's work backwards to like where how much that how we're gonna afford that house great so we understand like where we wanna be or you know financially let's talk about what we're willing to sacrifice in order to get that and we listed up all those things it's like look for my twenties business is gonna come before like relationships so like meaning there's gonna be a lot of times that i'm not gonna be around when you need me but that's because i'm gonna be dedicating a lot of time in order to get this other goal that we have that we're gonna have in our thirties things like that and so we really just outlined like very specifically where we wanted to be in ten twenty and thirty years and we did it exactly like a business where it was like here's where we wanna go specifically like here's how much money we want how many kids we want the type of lifestyle we want the type of family we want in our life if we wanted us to raise them religious or not religious like all this stuff and of course we knew it will change as we grow and get more information but anyway we did that to get that hard stuff out of the way another thing that we do which is like kinda lame but you know how a company has o k ours which stands for objectives and key results and like you're supposed to set those quarterly we and annually you have like an annual target and then like quarterly like benchmarks we do that for our life and so we have an adventure one we have a like relationship one we have a financial one and we have a a physical fitness one where it's like our here's where we like here's what we wanna do like for our health here's what we want to the trips that we wanna take here's we wanna be financially here's the ways that we wanna like give back to our family and spend time with them and we actually do these check ins once a week i use this journal that my friend started her name's kat it's called the best self c and she's got this relationship journal and for the longest time we still do it we would meet once a week on friday and we would document where we are in know according to our goals and it's pretty successful so anyway that's how i look at my marriage i i take it like i do two things that are kind of odd but i think it works is i we kind of operated like a business course it's like i remember when we were getting married the you have like meet with the priest ahead of time and we're were like yeah have the same dogs we have seen this and we'll and he was like well you guys love each other and we're like yeah dude obviously like of course so like i wanna acknowledge that like this sounds like really regiment but there's like all that love and the important stuff is totally obviously there that's most important like but like logistically we do a really good job of like outlining what we wanna achieve together as a family for the next quarter and the next year in the next ten years and then we do a really good job of like checking in weekly and monthly to discussing like are we happy with how things are going what do we need to change and things like that and i think it works really well like learning how to do these having these conversations that was actually kinda hard but i think it works so that's my tips for successful marriage but honestly a successful relationship i've got a lot of relationship sean and i you know the less popular c this podcast him and i have had a relationship for ten plus years now and it's fairly harmonious what is very harmonious a bunch of my coworkers i've worked with now for six seven eight nine ten years so it mostly works pretty good these types of check ins and conversations so anyway that's my small amount of tips for having a good marriage