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I know a true story; I think Kevin Coyne shared it during one of our grueling shot days in Atlanta. It was a story of someone he knew personally, and it really stayed with me. A couple, careful, hard-working, ordinary people, spent many years saving. Every cent they could spare went toward one goal: they wanted a house on a lake, where they would finally retire. That was the plan. Work now, sacrifice now, deny themselves everything they can now, and one day, when the house was finished, and it would be time to retire, a good life would begin. They talked about it constantly. They could picture it. They were building, literally, toward that someday.
And then one day they got into their car and drove out to the lake house. It was time to retire. They sent movers with all the furniture to the house and got in a car with the remaining things to finally start their new life, the one they were waiting for for many years. And on the way there, to the life they had waited to start what felt like their entire lives, they tragically died in a car accident.
And there are so many stories like this one. People who choose not to live now so they can live later, who keep deferring the living for some perfect someday, and the someday never comes. It is a dangerous thing to do, and many people are doing some version of it right now.
I advise people who are leaders within large companies for a living, as one of my roles. And one of the most dangerous beliefs I know, in business and in life, is the one that couple built their whole future on: that you can put the things that matter most on hold now, that you can wait to live your life the way you want to live your life, and that what you will have later, as a result, will be more than worth it. It’s the lie hiding underneath the advice many people give: find work-life balance, get through this season, just get kids to university, there will be another class trip to the forest. The last one is from my personal experience.
When I was about 8 years old, I really wanted to go on a class trip to a nearby forest. It felt magical to be able to do it. My mother said, “No, you have to go to music school,” which I hated with a passion. I said I really wanted to go to the forest, and I was a child who rarely asked for anything, if at all; my mother said there would be other class trips to the forest.
There has never been another class trip to the forest.
And in fact, my family moved to another apartment shortly after, so a class trip to that forest was no longer an option.
Having work-life balance is a lie. And I’m going to prove it to you with a performer who never seems to miss, with a study of seven thousand people, and a theft that taught me which things in life you genuinely cannot get back.
Why Balance Is a Lie
Let’s start with where the advice even comes from. When someone says I need more balance, notice they didn’t reason their way to that. They absorbed it, the way we absorb most of what we believe, from everyone around us repeating it. So let’s actually check it, instead of accepting it.
Let’s use finance language. Balance is just diversification. Everything hedged. Nothing concentrated. And diversification is excellent at exactly one thing: protecting you from disaster. It is almost useless at producing an extraordinary return.
Extraordinary returns, in a portfolio and in life, come from the opposite of balance. They come from concentration. Disproportionate resources, on very few things, usually invested over a long time. And time spent on something is, by definition, time taken away from everything else. So a balanced life and an extraordinary one are not just hard to combine. They pull in opposite directions.
The magic never happens in the middle. It happens at the extremes, and you know it very well. The middle is where everything gets a little, and nothing ever gets enough to become exceptional. There was a reason why before we had a breadwinner and a homemaker. Each side was taken care of. Each side got sufficient attention. There is a reason why straight-A students are generally “geeks” while studying; I am one of them, so I think it is ok to use this word lovingly. We put in extraordinary efforts to get extraordinary results. As a side note, you may say, “But Kris, I knew someone who didn’t work that much harder and did very well.” Of course, there are also people like Michael who are just very gifted at things that society values, and he is one of the rare people who can be at the top of the class without putting in extraordinary efforts. But then, I see him work, and he works as hard as anyone anyway.
Noteworthy Highlight
Most companies do not have an AI strategy. They have an AI shopping list. A copilot here, an agent there, and a proud number for how many employees use the tool. It sounds good for now, when AI is still relatively new. It creates no value. An AI strategy is a functional strategy. Its one job is to serve the corporate strategy and widen the spread between the return on capital and its cost. The moment it stops doing that, growth stops creating value and starts costing you. Read the full argument here: https://firmsconsulting.com/ai-strategy-vs-corporate-strategy/
The Performer Who Never Seemed to Miss
I promised you a performer the audience swore never made a mistake. That was me.
I trained as a concert pianist, and I was performing in front of large audiences before I was even a teenager. And here is what no one in those audiences ever knew, at least to my knowledge. On a stage, you are not in control the way it looks. You miss notes. Your memory slips. There were times I forgot an entire passage, mid-performance. I had to drop back to the last place I knew and rebuild from there, in real time, in front of everyone.
And nobody could tell. Not because I didn’t make the mistake; I made it, but because I did it without skipping a bit, before the mistake ever became obvious to people, interesting even to some people who were musicians. This was a lesson about far more than music, of course. The artistry was not in playing it perfectly. It was in how fast, and how discreetly, I recovered so that I could maintain the enjoyment the listeners were experiencing. Often I would be told, this was my favorite performance of this particular piece of music, for example, Rachmaninov or Beethoven, my 2 favorite composers at the time and the kind that can cause heart issues if you really put your heart and soul into performing them for too long. And I would think, “But I missed an entire piece.” Yet, no one could tell. In such situations, you don’t need to say anything about mistakes, just “smile and wave” like what penguins recommended in Madagascar.
That is a model for a life that works, and it is the opposite of balance. Balance is something you hold still, and nothing alive is ever still. A human life is in constant motion. It’s dynamic. You lean all the way into what matters most, which in the case of my performance was to put my heart and soul into music so it would move people emotionally, people would feel something, even people who got to a point in life where they struggled to feel anything. And not missing some pieces was secondary, provided I could do so without damaging people’s enjoyment of the performance. You fall out of position, and the only thing separating the people who make it from the people who fall out of the game is how fast they recover before the failure is obvious and hard to recover from.
So I don’t call it balance. Balance was never the goal. I call it prioritization, like prioritizing making people feel things when I play, and not worrying too much about forgetting a piece here and there. You are always, deliberately, deciding what to overweight right now, and correcting before the things you allocate a lot less attention to become a problem. Change that one word, from balance to prioritization and smarter allocation of scarce resources, and every hard choice in your life on what to focus on and what to give as little as possible attention to, or none of your attention to, suddenly has an obvious answer.
The Two Buckets, and the Study of 7,000
There is a difference between building a ship that makes it safely to harbor and building something that sinks before its time.
Think of your life as two separate buckets. One is work. One is everything else. And they do not follow the same rules because of one thing almost nobody talks about: some things can be recovered and fixed even after years of neglect, and some things decay without a way to turn back the clock.
In your work, you go long. Mastery is something you pursue over time. Reputation is something you pursue and uphold. A body of work is something you develop. Trust is something you build, usually over years. So you concentrate. You let yourself go badly out of balance, for long stretches, on something that matters to you, an area of expertise, and you let the less important work be done with as little attention as possible, or not done at all. Of course, you still have to deliver and overdeliver for your clients, that goes without saying. Spreading yourself evenly across all of your work guarantees you’ll be competent at everything and exceptional at nothing. So in the work bucket, go long.
But your personal life flips the rule. Because those things decay when you neglect them, and often you cannot get them back. Your health, your closest relationships, your character, these are not just projects you obsess over for a decade. They’re living things that need at least a minimum of attention, constantly, or they erode, even to a point where you can’t recover. You can lean away from any one of them for a moment. You can never neglect any one of them for long. So in the personal bucket, you go short. Small, frequent corrections, sufficient attention, exactly like the performer on the stage focusing on what actually matters.
And I promised you a seven-thousand-people example. Here it is. A long-term study of roughly seven thousand civil servants in the UK found that the ones who routinely worked eleven-hour days, week after week, were about sixty-seven percent more likely to develop heart disease. So this is not a wellness preference. It is the difference between being well and putting too much pressure on your body so you are not there to enjoy the fruits of your labor.
Noteworthy Highlights
Become a Published Author – Two Ways
1. Co-Author with Bill Matassoni (One-Time Only)
We are starting to wrap up the co-authored book with Bill Matassoni where we still can fit in one more author. Join me, Bill Matassoni, a former McKinsey & BCG senior partner and head of the McKinsey Quarterly, and a few senior members of our community in a book for top executives. Your name alongside Bill’s, mine and other senior leaders. Learn more or email [email protected]. One last chapter spot is available and only because some authors asked for extra time to work on their chapters.
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The Five Balls
Here’s a way to put it that I think you will find very valuable. It comes from the novelist James Patterson.
Imagine you’re juggling five balls. Call them work, family, health, friends, and integrity. And here is what many driven people learn far too late. Only one of those balls is made of rubber, and it’s work. You drop it, and it bounces straight back. You lose a deal, you miss a quarter, you lose a job, you take a 3-year sabbatical, and you can recover. You can recover to the point where you would be in a situation as if you haven’t made a mistake, you haven’t lost 2-3 years of work, you haven’t lost a job. It is just the nature of this ball; you can rebuild stronger than ever before.
The other four (family, health, friends, integrity) are made of glass. You drop one of those, and it doesn’t bounce. It chips. It cracks. Some of them shatter, and no amount of success later will ever bring them back.
That couple I told you about at the start? They did everything the careful way; they saved, they sacrificed, they waited. But they treated their own lives like a rubber ball, something they could drop a couple of times because they could enjoy it later: the moment the house on the lake was finally ready and it was time to retire. A life isn’t a rubber ball. It’s the most fragile glass there is. It’s a crystal ball. A precious, one-of-a-kind crystal ball that we need to treasure. And by the time they reached for it, it was already on the floor, broken without the ability to repair it.
The Theft
I promised you a theft, and this is an experience that taught me an important lesson. As many of you know, years ago, we published some of the methodologies we had spent years and decades building, for example, a particular way of thinking about how a business creates value, and where it should place its capital. And we watched people lift it, almost word for word, sometimes copying our slides, including typos, and pass it off as their own. No attribution. And if I asked a particular person, and there were way more than one, to stop doing it because I have very good detective talent, I can dig up things even private investigators will not be able to dig up, when I would ask people to stop doing this, they would become abusive. This happened to me more than once.
For a while, that made me angry, the way being robbed makes anyone angry. But here is what it actually taught me, and it is exactly the lesson of the five balls. The work itself was rubber. It bounced. We built much more advanced methodologies, and that older body of work we published is very basic compared to our later work, yet is part of why we are included on a list of the world’s top thinkers in management (e.g. I was selected as Top 30 Gurus in management 3 years in a row by Global Gurus, our books are used in major universities, etc.), beside people whose books influenced the entire field, just like our work did. The work ball always can bounce back. It always can.
But the theft put a different ball in my hands, and this one was glass. Because when you are taken from like that, you get to decide who it turns you into. You can let it make you bitter and angry. You can start guarding everything and giving less. You can even let yourself believe that, after what was done to you, cutting your own corners is only fair. That ball is your integrity, and it is glass. You only get to drop it once.
So I made choices that look strange from the outside. I let the rubber ball bounce, I stopped chasing credit and recognition, and there are things we no longer teach from a public stage at all, not to hoard them, but because we would rather pour them into the few people we truly serve, for example within our executive coaching programs, and our other coaching programs and memberships, than perform them for a crowd many of whom will not even understand what we are saying let alone be able to implement it. And I put that energy into the glass instead: the standards, and the people we refuse to abandon even when it costs us. The easy choice is always the rubber ball. But some things are glass. And those, you protect with everything you have.
Final Thoughts
So here it is in summary. It’s not about balancing your life. It is about prioritizing what matters. Go long on the few things at work that you can build on and that matter. Go short, but never absent, on the people and the health and the integrity that decay the moment you look away. And never, ever, confuse the rubber ball for a glass one.
Most people make the same trade without ever noticing: a little more security, in exchange for a little less of the life they actually wanted. I can’t tell you what trade to make. But I am going to tell you that you’re making one, right now, whether you admit it or not. So the important question is: are you making it on purpose, with your eyes open? And are you making the right trade for you?
Everything you just read is the easy part. Reading about prioritization, nodding along, even feeling it, none of that changes that much how you actually spend next Monday. The hard part is doing it: deciding, with clarity and determination, what in your career and your life you are going to go long on, and what you are finally going to stop pretending you’ll “get to later.” And how to ensure that on July 29th 2027 your life is an upgraded version of what it is now. That is the exact work we do with a small number of leaders, alongside Michael, in our executive coaching.
Executive coaching with Michael and me
It is deliberately tiny groups (literally 2-3 people on a particular call), a handful of senior leaders, never a crowd on any particular call, so the work is genuinely personal, with a deep dive with each client on every call. And there is work that happens between the calls when Michael and I have regular meetings to strategize what is the right next moves for each client. The heart of mentoring is the deep dives: about fifty minutes of focused, unhurried work with each client on every call on your real situation, with both Michael and me on the call, thinking it through with you. Your actual decisions, your actual trade-offs, the glass balls you’ve been risking, and the rubber one you’ve been overprotecting or not sure how to bounce back.
If you’ve been meaning to get serious about your career and life, not someday, now, simply reply to this email. As I mentioned, we keep the groups tiny on purpose, and seats are limited.
Take care,
Kris Safarova
P.S. The couple in the story believed real life would begin “later.” If there is one decision you’ve been deferring to someday, that is exactly what we should work on first.
P.P.S. We also have more affordable coaching options via the MasterPlan Annual and Speak Without Limits.
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