REFLECTION
The ten days culminating with the Fanatics Flag Football Classic in Los Angeles were among the ten busiest days I’ve had in a very long time, back to back. There were meetings, calls, press, flights, rides, meals, parties, practices, so much talking, and of course the games themselves. For a week and a half, if I wasn’t “on” then I was either moving or sleeping.
This isn’t a woe-is-me story. I’m not looking for pity or praise. I loved it. I asked for this. I said “yes” to all of these commitments. They were necessary and important elements of business initiatives that are a big part of my professional priorities. They were also a great time, by and large, so there was no scenario where I was going to beg off or bail on any of them. When I commit to something, I go all in. That’s just how it is, and I suppose it’s the only way I know.
But stretches like this have a cost. You can go hard in the paint for only so long, before you need to rest and recharge or risk hurting yourself. As the famous entrepreneur and author, Jim Rohn said, “when your outflow exceeds your income, your upkeep becomes your downfall.” He was talking about how we spend our money—living within or beyond our means. But his advice applies equally to how we spend our time and energy, and the effect our choices have on our physical, mental, and emotional health when we’re out of balance.
When I finally got home at the end of this crazy ten-day stretch, I felt the truth of Rohn’s point in my body and my brain. It brought my attention back to a list I made at the beginning of the year of the things I wanted to prioritize or spend a little more time doing or trying when my football career was over. They’re things I also felt could help balance me out a little bit; improve my ability to calm my nervous system, calm my brain, calm my body, and, more generally, just be okay not feeling like I always have to achieve.
Surfing.
Learning to dance better, sing better.
Learning to cook.
Learning to swim better.
Meditate more.
Spend less time doomscrolling on social media.
Spend more time journaling and reading.
The list isn’t crazy, but it’s one that can be hard to work on when you spend ten days away from home, going full gas no brakes until your tank is virtually empty.
Which begs the question: is this kind of balance even possible for someone like me?
LESSON
The typical ‘work-life balance’ person talks about life as if it’s a Trivial Pursuit pie and all your priorities are equal-sized wedges that you should be trying to give equal time, at all times. But when you’re trying to accomplish something unique or do something special, especially when it’s hard or there’s competition involved, it’s my experience that you don’t have the luxury of that kind of daily balance. Or weekly balance. Or monthly balance. Or sometimes even yearly balance. You have to be willing to put disproportionately more time, energy and focus into doing what it takes to get things done or else you won't find the success you’re looking for.
When I was with the Patriots, one of Bill Belichick’s famous quotes was, “no days off!” He didn’t mean we literally couldn’t rest or that we had to practice seven days a week. He meant that if we wanted to be great, and if we wanted to win Super Bowls, then we needed to be working toward greatness in everything we did, every single day. If that meant extra sleep and less time going to the movies, if that meant eating super healthy at home and passing on birthday dinners with friends, if that meant staying home to study film instead of attending a charity event for a good cause…then so be it. That’s what it took.
This doesn’t mean balance isn’t possible, it only means that you have to change your definition of it.
I talked in a previous newsletter about how our priorities form a kind of pyramid:
At the top is yourself, and your physical, mental, and emotional health. Then there’s the relationship with your significant other or partner. Then you have your children, then your work, then your extended family, your friends, your hobbies, and finally your greater community.
Now, imagine that pyramid of life priorities reshaped into an eight-sided dice. What I have learned over the years is that for a highly driven, excellence-focused, achievement-oriented person, the form of balance that’s most available to them involves always going all in on whichever side of that dice is face-up at any given time. You might spend more time on one of those priorities than all the others in a given week or month or year, but when it’s their time, the other priorities get the same level of intensity. That’s balance.
When the work side of the dice was face-up for me as a football player (which was quite often), for example, I was obsessed with winning a Super Bowl, with throwing a spiral, with being a great teammate, with being perfect on the practice field and in the game.
When the kids’ number comes up, that means distraction-less vacations, movie nights, quality time, long talks about whatever’s on their minds, phone off, trying to find my ways to relate to them.
When it’s my friends or my parents or my sisters, they get my undivided attention, as well.
You get the idea.
Achieving this kind of balance isn’t always easy. I haven’t lived up to the standard I just articulated 100% of the time. In reality, few people can. It’s not for lack of desire or lack of trying. It’s not a product of having out-of-whack priorities, either. It’s a matter of focus and energy.
APPLICATION
This gets us back to the idea of inputs and outputs.
If you’re doing too much, and you don’t take the time to recharge your social battery, then you start to slip, to make mistakes. You start majoring in the minor stuff, neglecting the things that matter for the priorities most pressing at the moment. Worse, you start working at cross-purposes to them. Resting when you should be working out, working out when you should be resting. Engaging in poor social behaviors when you should be dialed into the people around you. Eating a bunch of crap when you should have your nutrition zeroed in.
There are a hundred examples like this. They happen when you don’t give your full attention to the face on the dice looking up at you, and instead fiddle with all the others. And just like I talked about last week, when you split your energy between multiple things, none of them get your maximum effort and attention.
A lot has happened in my life over the last three years, since I retired from football. I started a new career, some new partnerships and business ventures. I’m trying to rebuild my body after the physical toll 23 years in the NFL took on it. I’m working on being super committed to my kids as they navigate the different phases of their teenage years and we navigate the trials and tribulations of life as an extended family.
My goal is balance. My list of things to learn and work on is part of achieving that goal. They recharge my social battery. They stimulate my head and my heart and my body. They help keep me healthy along all three main dimensions—physical, mental, emotional—so that I can fully indulge the ambitious part of my character without letting it steal energy from the other major priorities in my life.
Some might argue that, at 48 years old and successful by most metrics, I should be less ambitious. I should dial down my professional priorities and give that energy and focus to all the other priorities in my life. That’s the conventional wisdom about how people should find balance. Except I’m not that kind of person. I tend to work on overdrive. I tend to do more rather than do less. I tend to work harder than to work less hard. I tend to overthink as opposed to underthink. I tend to work out more than work out less. You get the point. There’s no suffering or sacrifice in that for me. I would rather be like that than not be like that. Honestly, it would be harder for me to live outside my true nature and deny it than to accept it and live inside it.
The answer to the question of balance for me isn’t to do less. It’s to do as much as possible around whichever priority has my attention, and then to do as much as possible to recharge my social battery so I can do it again with the next, most pressing priority. I don’t think I’m alone in this being an effective strategy. Balancing priorities is not most people’s problem, it’s balancing their inputs and outputs so each of their priorities gets their full attention when it matters.
All that said, as I sit here reflecting on what was an epic ten-day, sprint-marathon of a business trip, I have to be honest with myself about what my body, my brain and my heart are asking of me right now. Am I recharging enough? Am I nourishing myself enough? Am I moving enough? Am I sitting still enough?
I don’t know yet.
Finding balance is a process, often more mental than anything else. You have to dream it, plan it, then execute. That’s where success comes. It’s easier said than done, obviously. But sometimes saying these things out loud to yourself is the best thing you can do. It’s speaking words into existence as a way to take your own advice.
Writing this newsletter is my version of that. It’s talking to myself. The question is how well am I listening? Only time will tell, when a different priority requires all of my attention and it’s time to answer the call. Until then, I’m going to meditate on it, or maybe go for a swim.
