Also think a lot of the obsession with “balance” comes from copying people’s post-success lifestyle as if it were their pre-success strategy. People see the 38yo founder who trains every morning, sleeps 8h, spends loads of time with family, travels constantly, angel invests a bit, reads for 2h and somehow only does 4h of “real work” a day. What they don’t see is the 8 years of 80-hour weeks, the holidays half-spent on a laptop, the dinners constantly cut short, the period where friends basically assumed they’d cancel, the years of one city, one company, one obsession and not much else. Same with creators, artists, athletes, investors, etc. Once the main bet has paid off, diversification suddenly makes loads of sense. There’s money, reputation, distribution, network, maybe a bunch of equity worth protecting. The marginal return on another 20h of work is lower, while health/family/time suddenly become much more valuable. So yh of course the portfolio gets more balanced. The mistake is looking at someone’s post-success allocation and assuming that was the strategy that produced the success in the first place. And successful people often make this worse themselves. They go on podcasts and give advice based on the bottleneck they have now, not necessarily the one they had at 25. The founder with $20m tells you to protect your time. The guy with 3m followers tells you not to obsess over growth. The person who spent a decade working nonstop tells you balance is everything. Social media makes this even worse cause before, young ambitious people used to read long biographies which explained the struggle, the boring years, the long path before the success. You saw the sequencing. Now you open Instagram/TikTok and basically only see the post-success lifestyle of those founders (morning workout, nice house, family lunch, podcast, angel investing, etc.) Nobody posts: “year 6 of doing the exact same thing in a small office.” The balanced life is what you can buy with the proceeds of an earlier overallocation (ie dividends). Don't chase the post-liquidity lifestyle pre-liquidity.

I think ambitious people should treat life in “seasons” rather than trying to balance everything every day. A few years massively overallocated to work. A period getting seriously fit. A year or two nomading. Then family takes priority for a while. Then maybe at 35 you go completely insane again and spend four years building a new company, and so on. The mistake is thinking every metric needs to stay green all the time. Most great outcomes (building a company, writing sth serious, training for an event) need uninterrupted runs, not daily moderation. Sometimes work should suffer cause you’re travelling, sometimes your social life should suffer cause you’re building, sometimes career progression should slow cause family matters more. That’s fine. And tbh it probably makes life more fun too. You get actual chapters and completely different versions of yourself instead of spending 40 years maintaining the same perfectly optimised routine. A few intense years in one city, a weird nomad phase, an obsession that takes over your life, then something completely different. Probably much more memorable than one very long well-optimised Tuesday. It's why I encourage everyone to think of balance in years, not days. A good life can look horribly unbalanced on some random Tuesday and still be very balanced over 10 years.

Most rich kids I've encountered, and especially the high-agency/ambitious ones, feel deeply miserable and find any life pursuit inconclusive. They can never obtain the certainty that they are actually good at something. Every signal is basically contaminated. Did the company work because they are talented, or because the family funded five years of losses and supplied the first customers? Do people enjoy their company, or the access around them? Do they genuinely want to make films, launch a fund or live in New York, or have they simply never been forced to choose? Every success is discounted by the surname, introductions and safety net. Every failure is inconclusive because it never becomes existential. Dad can just recapitalise the experiment and let them try on another identity. This also explains why so many rich kids become obsessed with weirdly legible forms of achievement and scoreboards: elite credentials, ultramarathons, artistic recognition, military service, extreme physical transformation or businesses built completely outside the family industry. They become desperate for some uncontaminated proof of competence. One arena where the surname, family network or inheritance cannot explain the result. If there’s one luxury inherited wealth can’t buy, it’s the certainty that you deserved your own life.