The Unbalanced Life

The secrets of temporarily unbalancing your life to achieve your dreams…

On today’s episode Russell talks about why his life is unbalanced because he isn’t getting any sleep and why right now, that is okay.

Here are some things you’ll hear in this episode:

• Why entrepreneurs don’t have the privilege of living a balanced life when you are just starting out.
• And why you have to sacrifice balance sometimes to get the momentum you need to succeed.

So listen below to find out why it’s okay for Russell to live an unbalanced life sometimes.

---Transcript---

Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to a special late night “Marketing in Your Car.” Actually it should be called, “Marketing in Your Ferrari”, because right now, late at night, I’m driving to the office in the Ferrari.

Hey, everyone. I want to welcome you to this webinar. This is not a webinar. This is a podcast. You can tell my brain’s a little bit fried right now. Over the last week or so, we’ve had Todd and Dylan and Chris and the entire Click Funnels crew flew in to Boise so we could focus on getting Click Funnels live and launched, and it’s been super fun. We’re halfway through the week, and we’ve got the other half coming up, and so I’m going in for another late-night session so that we can keep cranking this thing out so we can have it ready for you guys all to experience here soon, and I’m really excited. We’ve got some amazing changes. If any of you guys have used Click Funnels yet, you’re going to be blown away by the new editor and the new UI that we’re rolling it out on Thursday, and so we’re trying to hit a hard deadline and get it all done by Thursday, which will be pretty cool. So that’s why we’re all killing ourselves right now.

I was thinking about some stuff recently. In my life, I’ve been trying to do so many things. I’ve been trying to get this new company launched while keeping our old company growing, while being a dad with my kids now in football, and my daughter in soccer, and then trying to be a good husband, and trying to do all of my church responsibilities. There’re so many things that are happening right now, and I’ve been trying to live a balanced life and because of that, I basically had to cut out sleep almost completely from my schedule, which has caught up with me. It’s been hurting, so I’ve been trying to get some more sleep, and so I’m trying to figure out, what do you do? They always talk about living a balanced life, and how do you do that as an entrepreneur, especially when you’re trying to launch a new company, and trying to provide value to the world. How do you do it?

I was thinking about a couple of things, and funny enough, by both of them coming from Mark Cuban, who, if you guys don’t know who Mark Cuban is, you’re probably living under a rock right now, but one thing he said that was really interesting, and I’m going to slaughter the quote, but he said something along the lines of – something about sleeping at night, like, “While my competitors sleep, and I’m staying up at night getting ready to kick his butt,” or something like that, and so that’s been our mantra, because we’ve been going through this. We’ve got a couple of big competitors, some of them with VC money and everything that we’re competing against. We’re the ones busting our butts at night while they’re sleeping soundly in their beds, and they’re not going to know what came and hit them, so that’s exciting.

The other Mark Cuban thing was I was listening to, watching “Shark Tank”. This was a couple of months ago, but I remember this one scene, and it kept replaying through my head this weekend as I was trying to figure out how to become more balanced. He was talking about how, as an entrepreneur, when you’re first getting started out, you can’t lead a balanced life. He was talking about how things have to fall to the wayside, because there’s so much effort and momentum that has to go into launching this thing. He was like, “Entrepreneurs do not get the privilege,” or whatever you want to call it, “the luxury of having a balanced life when they’re getting started.” Someday, obviously, the goal of being an entrepreneur is to shift that, right? So all of this effort, you kind of frontloaded turns into this company that pays for itself, pays for you and your family so that you can go and live those things you want.

It got me thinking about that. It’s not good to always live your life unbalanced, but there are times when I think you have to, to be able to push forward and to succeed. I look at when I was wrestling in high school and college. My life was very unbalanced towards that, but that’s what I had to do to be able to succeed. You’ve got to sacrifice other things to be able to do that.

I look at the two years I spend on a mission for my church, and when I was doing that, life was very unbalanced. I was giving up everything else to be able to focus on that aspect and to be able to serve the world in that way, and so while I think that the goal is to get to a balanced life,  I think in order to get the momentum you need to succeed at almost anything, that initial inertia comes from being not in balance, and so you have to kind of pick and choose.

Tonight, my wife and I sat down, and we started talking about what aspects I need to cut during this process to be able to function, so there’s going to be some things in my life that I love that I’m going to have to cut out just so that I don’t die [laughs] from lack of sleep and lack of everything, right? So one of the things I’m going to cut out is going to be weight-training. It’s going to be this and that, and like, “What are the pieces I’m going to pull out so that I can focus on the good stuff which is obviously launching this company and having success with it and all of those types of things.

Anyway, kind of fun – that’s what’s going down. I’m at the office now. Late night, I’m driving the Ferrari. Things are good. Time to get this Click Funnels launched so it can change the world, both your guys’ and mine. I’m excited, and I will talk to you guys soon.