How To Master the Balancing Act of Work and Family Life (#88) — Transcript
Updated: Oct 26
THE PICTURE OF WEALTH · EPISODE 88
Dustin Serviss examines the tension between building a business and being present for family. Through stories and a skydiving analogy, he explores the foundations that support both financial progress and life at home.
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This transcript was generated from the episode audio and lightly edited for readability. It may contain transcription or speaker-attribution errors. Refer to the recording for exact wording.
Chapters
[00:00:01] Introducing the Picture of Wealth
[00:01:01] The parachute analogy and your foundation
[00:02:18] A portfolio of memories
[00:03:40] When work interrupts a family commitment
[00:04:49] Putting wealth lessons into practice
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Transcript
[00:00:01] Show announcer: Welcome to the Picture of Wealth, a podcast all about living more of your life now yet being responsible for your future. Lifestyle experimenter, wealth scientist, and financial coach, Dustin Service, shares life hacks, wealth tips, and interviews successful entrepreneurs on how they're thriving in happiness, purpose, and prosperity.
[00:00:22] Dustin Serviss: Thank you for joining me today for what I consider to be a very important and often neglected factor in building our businesses and wealth. Please indulge me for a moment. Ask that you close your eyes and picture this. You're standing at the open door of a small skydiving airplane. Can you feel the wind on your face? Can you feel your adrenaline pumping? And then you hear, jump on three. One, two, three. Go, go, go, and you're out with the wind rushing. Don't open your eyes yet. Pull the cord and nothing happens. Now what memories flash before your eyes? Give it a moment. Let them wash over you, your family, your business. I need more time.
[00:01:01] Dustin Serviss: Now pull the second cord. It opens and you can relax. You can open your eyes now. How differently would you act when you landed? Are there any of you that have experienced this situation in your personal or business careers? When applying this analogy to guiding your mindset around wealth, you only get one chance to get this right before even getting in the airplane. You get your foundation wrong, any chance wreaking havoc on your family life and your financial life? I wanna introduce you to two business owners, friends of mine, that names obviously changed, tweaked for the story. But they're from different towns. One's named Harv.
[00:01:38] Dustin Serviss: One's name's Maria. Now Harv built up his business, successful person, reinvested everything he made back into the business, worked evenings, worked weekends, put all his energy into the business. And he sold his business at age sixty for three million dollars. Now I introduce you to Maria. She valued time off, was successful, really invested in memories. She also made her business a priority and also looked at it as a lifestyle component while she was alive. Now Maria, like I said, was successful, but she only sold her business at age sixty for one point five million dollars.
[00:02:18] Dustin Serviss: The punchline of the story is at age sixty three, they both passed away with money in the bank, so it didn't matter if you were Harv or Maria. Now the difference was is Maria had a diverse portfolio of memories that she'd built up over her life. And if I was able to go back and ask Harv, hey. If you would have known this would happen, would you have worked a little bit less or taken the odd weekend off and then satisfied your retirement with maybe two million dollars? Either way, both sums of money were enough for them to retire, yet Harv lived a very different life. Now whose values are you living right now,
[00:02:59] Dustin Serviss: and whose values do you wanna start living right now? Four years ago, I was not the same person as you listen to or see here today. I may have looked the same beside... But behind the gap of my teeth and in between my ears, my mind prescribed to a lot different way of thinking. I was all business. And I bring it back to a story of where we had recently had a child, and we were trying to get more work life balance. And in this story, I had booked daycare to go work out with my wife after work. I had called her in the morning. I said, I'm so excited. I booked day care. I'll see you at the gym at four forty five. She said, oh my god.
[00:03:40] Dustin Serviss: That's awesome. You haven't been, you know, very present, and I'm really appreciative for you to do that. That's gonna be awesome. We're gonna work out together because that's what we used to do. Later in the afternoon, the phone rang for the office, and all my staff had gone home. So I answered the phone. And I answered it in a sexy voice, service wealth management, and it was my wife. And I looked at the clock, and it was five o'clock PM. And she was standing at the gym, and she said, if you're answering the phone, then I guess you're not coming to the gym. I was absolutely floored. She hung up the phone. I drove home. I don't cry a lot.
[00:04:13] Dustin Serviss: I can think of in my adult life probably two times that I've cried. One was when a friend's brother passed away, and the other was a heartbreak at age eighteen, but I have not had very many times. This time, I was crying driving home thinking, I need to make a change. I need to find a way to make my family first. I have no idea how, though. I needed a structure. I feared that if I focused on my family first, that meant revenues go down. Take a day off, revenue goes down. Foot off the gas means the business will become nonexistent. I didn't see any way out. I needed to design a plan that I believed in, one that included all
[00:04:49] Dustin Serviss: the lessons, conversations, and values I'd acquired over seventeen years of meeting wealthy families who seem to have it going on. As the quarterback to over two hundred million in net worth, I've been exposed to a lot of outside the box thinking, yet I hadn't really applied it in my own life. Now the long story short is I created a framework, and I put it in a course called the net net tough, nine steps to create more financial confidence in your life to give you the structure to focus on other things in your life. I've talked about this before in other podcasts, but I can't stress it enough
[00:05:23] Dustin Serviss: that if you are in this situation where you don't know your way out and are looking for some way to get structure, go on service wealth dot com, look up the net net tough course, and there are nine four minute modules. And by the end of it, you will have a structure that you can take either for yourself or talk to your spouse about it, which is more productive. And from there, you will able to see how it isn't an either or. It's not either you're successful and you can't have family life or it's not family life only and you will not be successful. It's a and. Until the next pod. Alright, listeners. It's me doing the extra today.
[00:06:05] Dustin Serviss: This is the easy part. If you found this episode of value, let me know. Leave a review. And if you hear your review on a future episode, email me, and you'll receive a hundred dollars cash or a Visa gift card.