# Work-Life Balance Is Not What You Think Source: https://whatismaven.com/useful-balance/ Published: 2025-05-26 Updated: 2025-06-08 Author: Jeff Sarris --- Is this what’s keeping you from work-life balance? Let’s find out. ## Why Balance Is Different Than You Think Balance of any kind is an action, not a state. What do I mean by that? Balance is a constant shift of weight. It’s an action—constantly shifting our weight from one side to the other to attain what appears to be balance. But there is no actual state of balance. We never are in perfect balance because we’re constantly moving and constantly shifting. We can apply the same thing to our work-life balance. If we’re standing on one foot—say on a slack line—we’re leaning to the right, leaning to the left constantly. So we’re doing more until more is too much. Then we lean back—less until less is too little—and then repeat. With work-life balance, that’s what we can do. We can expand and contract to constantly try to strike a balance. [Embedded content](https://www.youtube.com/embed/sotSfu66QKE?feature=oembed) ### Balance as Action, Not State So what is work-life balance? I think it’s an action—purely an action. It’s striving for work-life balance. That’s something that didn’t come to me until recently—that work-life balance would be an action. Because you think of balance generally as “this is a balanced something.” But us as a human living, moving creature, we’re constantly in flux. So it’s not necessarily like how people are like “do 50/50″—like work 50% and life 50%—because that’s obviously so unrealistic. That will never happen. I think the big thing is that people would strive to have the perfection that it’s a state you can reach. But I don’t think there is one. You can have your rules and your tactics on how you keep your work-life balance. But it’s not an exact percentage of 50% this, 50% that. Instead, it is like Buddhism. It’s like an ongoing practice. It’s like trying to do mindfulness—you need to be in it and you need to constantly work at it. So there is no solution. The solution is the practice of it. ### Why Perfect Balance Doesn’t Exist It’s just like meditation. It’s not about clearing your mind. It’s about recognizing when thoughts arise and letting them flow away, letting them run their course. It’s not a state to seek. It’s not a state that you’ll ever find. And being comfortable understanding that there is no perfect balance, there is no perfect state of work and life. It’s an action of continuously expanding and then contracting. Like “now I’m doing too much, let me pull back.” “Right now I’m doing too little, let me go bigger.” And that’ll be a constant iteration for your entire work life. And to not be discouraged if you do need to keep tweaking every little bit here and there. You will keep shifting forever. It’s like a diet. It’s like everything—just finding that balance. ## What We’ve Been Up To So what are we doing? We’re sitting in the grass in Lumis Park at 14th, right across from Finnegan’s Way. We’re here in Miami. We love Miami Beach, so we come here as much as we can. And we literally booked this 48 hours before we left because I was sad, you were sad. It’s the work-life balance. We are ambitious to a fault, and we can do more until more is too much and not always do less. ### The Whirlwind Year This past year and a half has been an absolute whirlwind. I can’t even believe it’s been that long so far. There’s certain things I wish I had done differently or documented more on the journey. We do video—we travel all over the country and film with realtors in their market. I was so focused on everybody else’s stuff that I didn’t even think about mine. That was something that we’ve been working on: now I need to treat us like a client because that’s not fair to us. You’ve always pushed everybody else’s stuff to the forefront, which is good because it’s been a good solid business plan. However, your personal brand and everything is non-existent because for the past 15 years you’re behind the scenes of some recognizable things, but nobody would have any idea because you don’t post about it. It’s hard when you’re in it and you’re making all these things for everybody else, but then you’re not actually doing it for yourself. And it’s so easy to just forget about you. I don’t know, this sounds kind of ridiculous, but I forgot about myself in every single way. For the past year, that is the challenge. Nobody sees that side because that’s also what you hide from everybody. Here I feel like myself so much more than I have in a very long time. ### First Trip in Over a Year We’ve gone on—we’ve traveled a ton for [MAVEN](https://whatismaven.com) and filmed with people. But this is the first trip we’ve taken just the two of us in over a year. We always would come to Miami. Miami is the place. Miami is the one place where we can both turn off completely. We’re not working. We sort of lost ourselves in that. We did more until more was too much. And we didn’t pull back soon enough. Now we’re sort of shifting everything a little bit, which has really been helpful and good to not run ourselves ragged. Because we were traveling literally every single week of the year—in different time zones, not even in one contiguous time zone. It constantly was shifting. I was editing when I wasn’t filming with people, so I didn’t even get the time to stop and be like “okay, what are we making?” and take a deeper look at it and just make everything even better. We’re doing it on the fly, but it’s so much more difficult than people can imagine. We lost a little bit of the “oh yeah, we do also need to have a little more of our together life injected in.” We’re always together 100% of the time and we always have a really good time, but we don’t have the time to turn off. ### Stepping Back and Moving Forward It’s been good to step back and just sort of say goodbye to things and just move forward. Just shifting a little bit more in a healthy way to be a little more selfish. Because we do need to have a little more time for us. We need to focus a little more attention on the things we want to make that we’ve wanted to for so long, and we’ve taken baby steps towards it. There will be more things. If you’ve seen [Hiveway](https://myhiveway.com), there are some big things coming there that we are very excited about. It will be soon. We’re in Miami Beach. It is the Air and Sea show. We had no idea. Memorial Day weekend obviously, because this comes out on Memorial Day. This has been the most fun. This has been amazing. It is phenomenal. Having family in the military and everything, I have a special attachment to people who serve. Getting to be here for that, it’s really special. This is the most patriotic I’ve ever felt. I’m always very patriotic, but no one would have any idea. ## How to Find Your Work-Life Balance So trying to figure out how to have proper work-life balance—we literally are just figuring it out right now. It’s funny because I feel like an impostor trying to explain work-life balance when I’m literally just now feeling like my old self again. I haven’t felt like this in over two years. ### Learning as We Go I’ve done this expansion and contraction many times, not really understanding this concept. I’ve never heard anyone talk about balance in this way: “More until more is too much, less until less is too little.” But every time I say it to people, they seem to like it. They’re like “Oh, I get that.” The beauty of what you just said is we’re not the perfect specimen. We’re constantly learning. And you can teach people best when you’re just a little bit beyond where they are. If we’re like “we have this work-life balance thing so dialed and figured out perfectly forever,” that’s not as helpful. Even two weeks ago, we didn’t record an episode because there was no way. It was Mother’s Day, so we were busy that weekend, and there were so many different things going on. It was like “there’s no way we can do this and actually make it a worthwhile episode.” So why would you push through to make something shitty when you could just take a beat and be like “we’ll get back to it next week”? ### Find Your One Place I can’t honestly give concrete advice other than what has worked for us. For example, coming to Miami. This is our spot. This sounds really stupid, but hear me out: If you find that one place where you can go—you don’t need to think, you can just go—and what that could even just be in your state, it could be nearby, it could be whatever—the one place where you can go where you don’t need to think about anything. Coming to Miami for us, we seriously have our Airbnbs or hotels where we want to go. We’re staying at the same place we’ve stayed before because we really liked it. Always a great experience. Don’t need to think about it. Book the flights. We already know exactly what we’re going to expect here. We have our staples where we go. That is so good because we make a ton of decisions. The least amount of decisions I need to make, the better. Because decisions get in the way of the fun creative, which is what we both really like. And that’s what’s been in the way—having to make all these decisions all the time. ### The Caretaker Problem Something that we’ve found for us: both of us, the reason we connected, was we are just innately caretaker types who are trying to make sure the other person—we’re naturally both the caretakers in almost every relationship. So we’re doing everything in our power to make sure everyone else is having a good time all the time. And that isn’t an action that we think about. It’s how we’re wired. If we are with other people, I’m only focused on them and not you. Same—we don’t see each other for like a week and we’ll be like “Oh, how was your vacation?” When we’re filming with people, we won’t see each other for like four days. We will, but it’ll just be different. We’re both here facing the camera instead of each other. One of the things we discovered is we’ve brought people to Miami, which is really nice, but we weren’t able to turn off. And that was a shock to really come to that realization. Even in our favorite place—the only place we can turn off—we couldn’t. And that was destroying me. ### Protecting Your Turn-Off Place That’s part of the contraction. We expanded with work. We expanded even with our friend group and friend circle, which is really fun. It was a fun novel experience, but it wasn’t a vacation like how it typically is. It wasn’t a turnoff. We have a friend Mike who never turns off, and then Lisa just brought up how he turns off in one place alone—Jamaica. That was when it sort of clicked: “Wait, that’s part of the allure. That’s why we love coming here so much.” We’ve learned that despite having a good time, we probably are going to only do Miami alone for the almost foreseeable future. Until we find another place where we turn off completely, then we can share Miami with others. But right now, this is our only turnoff place. ### Take Care of Yourself First Find that place for you. Just take some time away and don’t stress about trying to find perfect work-life balance because it doesn’t exist. It’s an action—always seeking it. Just try to take that beat for yourself and take care of you more. Also, I got a massage for the first time in like years. It just felt really good. It was like taking care of me first. I know that’s not revolutionary for most people. They’re just like “Oh my god, I do Reiki or whatever.” But just doing those self-care things for yourself and trying to make you feel valued is really important. Because nobody else is going to make you feel that. And you just have to do it for you.