You don't have to give up your health or your relationship to be successful

I’ve spent the last six years of my life looking for advice on the internet about the perfect routine.

The one method that tells you how to maximize your productivity, make the most money, be jacked, and have great relationships all at the same time.

Some people say wake up at 5 a.m. and protect your sleep.

Some people say, “Work into the night. Wake up any time you want.”

Some people say work 40 hours and take rest, while others say work 80 hours and grind away.

I’ve tried many methods and always ended up switching because I never figured out what I actually wanted first.

The real issue is that we copy advice from people that we admire without checking if their life was built for what we actually want.

They may have sacrificed things that you’re not willing to sacrifice. You can’t see the cost from the outside, only the result.

Warren Buffet once revealed that he had a miserable family life, which was the result of living a life where picking stocks was his highest priority.

When Elon Musk was asked about the mental toll of Tesla’s struggles, he said, “This has really come at the expense of seeing my kids. And seeing friends.”

This is summarized well by a quote from Naval Ravikant:

“One day, I realized with all these people I was jealous of, I couldn’t just choose little aspects of their life. I couldn’t say “I want his body”, “I want her money”, “I want his personality”. You have to be that person. Do you actually want to be that person, with all of their reactions, desires, their family, their happiness level, their outlook on life, their self-image? If you’re not willing to do a wholesale, 24/7, 100% swap with who that person is, then there is no point in being jealous.”

Every self-help book you read. Every YouTuber that claims they’ve fixed productivity. Every happy habit you’ve copied without checking against your own values.

The reason they didn’t stick is because they don’t fit with your priorities.

You either stopped because it “just didn’t work out,” or because it broke a relationship, made you lose track of your health (including your sleep), or made you burn out.

Some of those things never fully come back.

If you eat like shit over many years, your health has no guarantee of a recovery.

If you consistently ignore your friends, parents, or girlfriend, don’t be surprised when they also give you less attention in the future.

The question is, for the people who you look up to, if you truly knew everything that they had sacrificed, would you still want that life?

In Same as Ever, Morgan Housel says,

“When you are keenly aware of your own struggles but blind to those of others, it’s easy to assume you’re missing some skill or secret that others have. […] Everyone’s dealing with problems they don’t advertise, at least until you get to know them well.”

The real problem here isn’t the advice. It’s the fact that the advice doesn’t necessarily fit our priorities.

If you’re someone that wants a lot out of life and be big one day—someone that has wealth and influence over the world, have you actually sat down and defined what your priorities are?

What are you willing to give up to get what you want?

For me, not knowing my values led to many clashes between what I said I wanted to do and what I actually did.

For instance on the weekends did I want to have a slow cup of coffee with my girlfriend, or did I want to work on my business as soon as I woke up?

In the morning, when my mind is clear, did I want to go to the gym or did I want to write?

It all felt like tradeoffs, and worst of all, it depended on my mood for the day.

When I finally realized this was a problem, I thought the issue was underallocation or overallocation of limited resources (my time and energy) across three axes: health, wealth, and relationships.

This seemed reasonable to me. My life revolves around the gym, my relationship, and my work.

I ranked my priorities (i.e. what I thought was most important) in this order:

Health
Relationships
Wealth

Reasoning: I didn’t want to become fat in my 20s & I didn’t want to lose my girlfriend or become unhappy due to my work.

However, this model fell apart when I realized that I didn’t actually value health the most.

I wasn’t willing to go to the gym every day. It just isn’t necessary.

I ate right, but it wasn’t my number one priority.

My priority was more about not losing my health, rather than gaining it.

Same for my relationship. While I valued it, I couldn’t spend every waking hour with my girlfriend. That’s a negative on many fronts and could even lead to liking each other less.

So how do I proceed without regret that I didn’t spend my morning at the gym, or my afternoon with my girlfriend?

How can I say “no” to something and SACRIFICE so that I can focus on my work, every single day, instead?

If you relate so far and struggle with a similar problem, you may be in luck.

I found a solution that I haven’t read anywhere else and implemented it. Here’s the key realization:

What you need, instead of balance, is a floor.

A MINIMUM, rather than an average, ideal, or mood-dependent level of work required to maintain your health and relationship so that the rest of your time and energy could be used to go all in on your career.

For me, this minimum is defined as follows:

Relationships

One day/week for friends & girlfriend. I can have a slow morning, afternoon, evening guilt-free. Dinner every day with girlfriend. At least 45 minutes sitting down.

Health

Three days/week at the gym, preferably in the morning. Two days lifting + One day cardio. Eat right six days of the week.

If I maintained that, I didn’t have to worry. I could say no to anything beyond that baseline.

Then, if I accounted for everything else basic (like food, cleanliness, sleep), the entire rest of my time could be spent on my work/career/business.

Read my other related guide for how to optimize everything else so you can maximize time and energy spent on work.

Try it, set your own baseline.

What’s the MINIMUM you have to do to avoid falling behind on your health or your relationships? Don’t do any more than that.

Here’s how you can effectively do this:

Find the floor by looking backward, when did neglecting this cause real damage?
For values involving another person, ask them directly what they need.

You can add more axes to this. Some that come to mind are

Fun (e.g. nights out)
Hobbies (e.g. you want to get good at guitar)
Faith/Spirituality.

Set a realistic, specific and time-bound floor to each.

Here’s why this works.

Extra effort in the gym, or with your relationship doesn’t scale as much as time doing important, hard, necessary work.

In fact, you get diminishing returns, or outright negative returns after a while.

If you truly want what you say you want out of life, but don’t want to give up everything else, this is the way forward.

Alex Hormozi says,

“Scale isn’t about doing more. It’s about removing everything that isn’t worth doing. Then doing as much as you can of what’s left.”

Now that you know what your priorities (= protected baselines) are, you can ignore advice on the internet that clashes with them.

If your favorite gym personality says go to the gym four times a week, but your baseline is two, you don’t have to listen to them. Your priority is different.

If your favorite business guru says work first thing in the mornings but you said you wanted to spend it with your family, then you don’t have to listen to them.

Life will pass you by following others’ advice, rather than your own values, before you know it.

When you’re 60, even if you have a successful business, you don’t want to think, “I shouldn’t spent more time with my family when I was younger.”

Or some other analogue of that…

Following your own well thought-out values and ignoring everything else is what stops the endless doom-scroll for success content, and what stops you from jumping ship every time someone else’s path looks better than yours.

Minimize everything that doesn’t advance your work, but don’t lose what’s important either.

Hope this helped you - try it out, and let me know what you think on X @armaanagrawal_