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

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, there's this amazing book called Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got. I read it a few years ago and it changed my life.
And the reason I loved it was because it basically talks about how to get and make more money using things that you already have.
Coincidentally, today's podcast is brought to you by Business Made Simple. It's a podcast by Donald Miller, who I'm gonna tell you about in a second, but he has this amazing episode that's all related to this book and the things that I learned in this book. It's called How To Make Money With What You Already Have. It's an incredible episode. Talks about all the stuff that I learned in this book. The host is Donald Miller. I didn't know who Donald Miller was up until recently, but over the last 12 months, this is totally by coincidence. It was all separate people. They said, you have to check out Donald Miller. He's amazing. So I'm happy that he's part of HubSpot's podcast network. You can check it out, Business Made Simple Podcast. It's where he coaches you on how to build your business like an airplane, where the cockpit is your leadership, the body is your overhead, the right engine is your marketing, the left engine is your sales.
You have to check it out. This guy's amazing. It's called Business Made Simple with Donald Miller.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:10)
Hey, MFM, my name is Rob. How do I keep my marriage and other relationships healthy when I work long hours?

**Sam Parr** (1:17)
All right, 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 10 years plus, and it's a pretty great relationship. Someone was asking me for advice on it, and I'm gonna reference something that I used to do. So basically, I talked about this thing on this pod. So basically, I've got this new thing I'm working on, and my co-founder and I, we did something interesting that seems pretty obvious to me, but when I mentioned it in the podcast, it surprised some people. But basically, we kind of both had an idea that we wanted to work on, and we were like, cool, 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, all right, we know this can work, but let's pump the bricks, stop right now, and I wanna have a conversation with you.
And what I wanna know is a bunch of questions.
And so I sent him the same questions, and then I went and answered them 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 worth 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 and adventure. I wanna work hard, but I wanna work like a 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, here's what I want in life. Then we each answered a question of 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 not willing to hire 10,000 employees. I don't want that. I'm not willing to have recurring meetings.
I'm not willing to do this or that. I am willing to work 80 hours a week. I 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 want to aggressively scale it, or that's what I said. I want to aggressively scale it. I want to hit $100 million in revenue in X amount of years.
So anyway, really specific. And then he answered this on his own, and we came back together, and we said, all right, let's see where we align and where we don't align, because I want to figure out right away if there's any deal breakers. And in fact, this is what I did when I sold my company. I said HubSpot wanted to buy us, and they sent me a cold email, and they go, hey, we want to talk about partnership. And I was like, I don't know what partnership means. Does that mean you want to buy us? Just tell me right away. And they said, yeah, we want to buy you. I said, cool.