239: How to Balance Marriage and Startups

Steli Efti:

Hey everybody this is Steli Efti.

Hiten Shah:

This is Hiten Shah.

Steli Efti:

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat I want to talk to you about a  little bit of a touchy difficult subject, which has been some of our favorites in  the past and some of the most impactful ones, which is how to deal with personal issues, family issues within your startup and within your work. The reason why this  comes to mind is that a founder that is not quite, I wouldn’t say is  a friend of mine, but is a founder that has been in touch with me for, I think, over two years now. We’ve talked a number of times. He always  kept me in the loop on his progress with his company by email. I feel  like I know this guy. I feel like I’ve helped him and advised him. I  feel like he had some really good success. He’s going through a tough phase and  he recently sent me a really long and heart-breaking email basically saying that he’s going  through a lot of personal issues within his marriage and that it dramatically impacts him  at work and that it creates this amazing amount of pressure, where he finally felt  like his company’s growing and he’s hiring people and they’re raised money and things have  gone really well and how he feels like he’s making all these mistakes. He’s not  really showing up and he’s calling in sick and things are starting to go bad  in his startup. It creates this downward spiral where the promise he has in his  personal life are affecting his work. Now, the work is becoming more stressful and more  problematic, which compounds his issues personally. He was just asking how to deal with this.  Not that I know, but I think the question, “How do you deal with personal  issues? When somebody is really sick or maybe death in the family?” We’ve talked about  this before. Or in this case, just having marriage challenges. How do you deal with  this within the context of running a startup? I don’t know if we have answers,  but I thought it’d be interesting to explore this difficult topic with you.

Hiten Shah:

Yeah. I love it. The best piece of advice I’ve heard on this and I  think it goes both ways. It’s the best piece of advice, but it’s not like  … Everyone has to follow their own way, but I think it’s still the best  piece of advice, even though I’m putting that caveat on it before I even say  what it is. I know you’re probably pretty good at doing this. I know I  am, which is don’t bring work home and don’t bring home work. What I mean  by that is I’m not telling you to compartmentalize your life. That’s not the advice.  This is what I mean by, “Hey. It depends on how that feels for you  and what that means.” I’ll get personal for a moment to explain this. For me,  my home life- I’ve known my wife since we were both 15. She’s watched every  single business I’ve started. In most of my businesses for the longest time I worked  with her brother and now I have another business partner too. She also does a  lot of things for our businesses and has forever. Our work and our home is  very intertwined in a way that most people I would say aren’t in today’s world  where there aren’t as many as what many would call family businesses. All of our  things right now that we work on are family owned, so to speak. One way  to think about it for us and for me is I set a structure where,  and my wife did too, where I am committed to being home on Saturday and  Sunday as much as possible. I don’t put anything on my calendar as much as  possible. That means probably 90 to 95% of the time my calendar on the weekends  is empty. Then on the weekdays I tend to be really impacted with meetings and  what most would call work. On Fridays about 60, 70% of the time I’m home  for dinner. Otherwise, no one will probably see me Monday through Thursday unless it’s a  rare Monday through Thursday where I start later in the morning or I’m able to  come home earlier and see the kids to bed. Now, that works for us. One reason is we know who we married. We know who are partners are on both  ends, right? My wife loves being at home. My wife doesn’t like to go out  and hang out with too many people, new people, she doesn’t know, but she knows  that I get a lot out of that and I enjoy doing that. It’s a  very balanced, not balanced life by any means, but it’s a balanced relationship in terms  of she has her needs met, I have mine met. For me, that’s how it  works. We’re both also working on both all of our businesses in different capacities. She’s  working very heavily on one of them and she manages expenses and finance for all  the rest of them. We keep doing more, so there’s always more to do for  her. She’s not someone who can just be a stay-a-home mom, so she works from  home. All of our companies are remote. She is working as much as I am,  even with the kids and all that. We have a little bit of help from  my mother-in-law most of the time. That’s how it works for us. The reason I’m  giving that example is it’s worked for us. It points  out how anyone listening to this is probably like, “You two are weird.” That’s just  not how most people think about things. You’re just like, “That’s absolutely correct.” Anyone else  that has a “You two is weird, too.” If they’re not, then they really haven’t  really figured it out. They’re taking a framework like, “Oh, you need a work life  balance or any of that.” You don’t need any of that. What you need is  your relationships to be healthy so my advice is focus on the relationship. Focus on  people’s expectations and making sure you’re meeting each other’s expectations including if you have kids and other people in your family are meeting their expectations, too. It’s not just about  your spouse or your partner. That’s the same for a co-founder relationship, to be honest.  I just go back to you want to solve the problem, it’s a relationship problem.  You need help, there’s therapists. There’s hypnosis. There’s mediation. There’s couples counseling. There’s going out  on a walk and just talking about life, not work. There’s a lot of these  tactics, and again it has to do with who you are and how you cope  with relationship sort of struggles.

Steli Efti:

It’s interesting. We’re going on a different track than I originally thought, but I love  this one as well so we might make this a two part episode at some  point. Talk about not so much what are you doing in a moment of crisis. What you’re describing is much more how do you set things up so your family  life and your company life, how can they coexist. How can they be in harmony  by creating expectations, by communicating, by setting up a foundation that’s really solid where expectations  are met, right?

Hiten Shah:

I started that on purpose though so I still think we’re one topic, and the  topic is about crisis. The reason I say that and I’m glad you’re bringing that  up is you can’t have some sort of way to resolve a conflict unless you  know what the other side looks like. To me, what I’m describing is an iterated  approach which might change in a year or six months or when things change a  little bit though we’re very comfortable, my wife and I having this conversation. You have  to find a way to have that conversation especially in moments of conflict if you  haven’t set this up yet. There is a way to do it. I guess, for  me, I shared that because I want people to feel like there’s a way to  do it. I don’t want them to feel like they need work life balance or  they need all this bullshit I hear with generic advice. This is relationships, and no  two relationships are the same.

Steli Efti:

Yeah. The other thing is oftentimes you have this sense of sacrifice in startups especially  where it’s this notion of, well, he’s starting his startup now and it’s going to  be really stressful, and we’re all going to have to sacrifice for a few years.  Then this magical, successful –

Hiten Shah:

Oh, my god.

Steli Efti:

Life will change, and it’s going to be the way I always dreamed it would  be. It’s like, A, … I love your reaction like, “Oh, my god.”

Hiten Shah:

Hell no.

Steli Efti:

Yes.

Hiten Shah:

Yeah.

Steli Efti:

There’s this expectation that we are short term suffering to get to some kind of  a long term end goal that’s much nicer. A, that end goal might never occur.  B, you don’t know how long it’s really going to take. C, you can’t just pause life. Of course you can make some decisions today for tomorrow, but you want  to set up a life that’s sustainable. Then what happens the startup is a success  or a failure. What happens afterwards many times your spouse, your wife will want to  start the next thing. Then you’re going through that again. It’s like I go back  to what you said earlier which is we know each other. We know who we  married. We know who we are. I like these things. She likes those things. How  do we make our life compatible, how do we make each other support each other,  how do we design a life together where we’re honest with who we are and  what we want versus this making compromises that are not sustainable or making sacrifices either  internally and quietly or externally and loudly that are not realistic. Like, “Oh, yeah. I’m  going to suffer the next five years for the rest of our life.” Bullshit. The  rest of your life is most likely going to look like the next five years.  Eventually, it’s going to break down. It’s not going to be sustainable. It’s not going  to work out that way.

Hiten Shah:

Yeah. You’re hitting on a big point. I think people don’t realize there is no  temporary pain for the other side. There’s a constant amount of work you have to  do on your relationships, as well as your work. I think getting delusional about it  and thinking you have to sacrifice for a few years, and then you get this  pot of gold at the end of the rainbow style thinking, I’ve never seen that  really pan out. That means you’re just making your family and yourselves go through kind  of these tough times that you’re making up. Your better approach is to think about how do you have sustainability in what you’re doing on both sides of work and  family life, or making sure you have that sort of outlet where you’re not just  working all the time if that’s not what you want or what you can sustain  with the relationships you have.

Steli Efti:

Yeah. All right, I feel like this is a good point to wrap this episode  up. I mean, man, family life, personal life, these are very emotionally charged topics. They  are difficult oftentimes because most people don’t communicate honestly. They don’t attack conflict when it’s  small, and it kind of grows over the years to something that’s very difficult to  deal with. We’ve talked about these things in co-founder relationships and conflict resolutions. Those are  two episodes you can look up that we’ve talked about in the past where one-on-one  conflict resolution doesn’t matter if it’s your co-founder, a teammate, or you husband or your  wife. Learning how to deal with conflict, learning how to communicate in conflict is so  crucial to maintaining any type of relationship. These things come up again, and again, and  again as we talk. I find that especially in people’s personal life, they seem even  more negligent than they are in their professional lifes for some reason with communicating honestly,  with attacking conflict, with dealing with misalignment which is another thing we’ve talked about. This  is a . I’ve talked about a startup team being aligned. I think the same  thing applies in personal life, in your family life. Is your family really aligned, is  your partner and you really aligned on where you want to go and what you’re  doing? If there’s misalignment, there’s going to be tension and friction and there’s going to  be conflict eventually. Learning to deal with these things head on and personal life will  obviously dictate the quality of your life overall and with that, I think, will have  a big impact on how you act in your professional life and how well you  can do with your startup. If your personal life is a mess, it’s going to  be … I mean, some people pull it off. I find that if your personal  life is a mess, it doesn’t matter if your startup is a success. Your life  will suck so try to figure out both of these things is going to be  crucial, I think, for long term success of you as a human being. Yeah, I  think-

Hiten Shah:

I got a-

Steli Efti:

Oh-

Hiten Shah:

I got a quick tip I learned recently.

Steli Efti:

Beautiful.

Hiten Shah:

I don’t remember where I got it from. It’s some book or some quote or  something and I was like, “Damn, that’s good.” When you’re communicating about how you feel  and it has to do with the other person, one of the best kind of  ways to do that because it’s the most honest truth is when you start by  saying the story I’m telling myself so I think-

Steli Efti:

Ooh, I like this-

Hiten Shah:

It’s really powerful. I learned it and I still don’t use it enough, but what  I realized is it’s one of those things you can’t abuse. You cannot abuse it  because all you’re saying is this is what I’m telling myself. That implies it might not be true. That implies there might be more information you don’t have. That implies  so many awesome things that kind of put people’s down, even your own. If I’m  just telling myself a story, that’s cool because that’s not necessarily a reality. When you  really think about it, what is a reality? It’s just whatever’s in your head anyways. The story I’m telling myself about this is and starting off like that I found  to be one of the most effective ways to have difficult conversations.

Steli Efti:

Beautiful. I love it, so powerful. All right, brother, I think this is it from  us for this episode. We’ll –

Hiten Shah:

All right.

Steli Efti:

All right, bye-bye.

Hiten Shah:

See you, bye.