Livin' La Vida Luna y Luca
Dia tricked me into going furniture shopping. I found the largest couch of the lot and shifted into park.
Four Burners Theory
The Four Burners Theory is a metaphor for work-life balance, stating that your life has four main quadrants: Family, Friends, Health, and Work. Each represents a burner on a stove.
The Trade-off: To excel in one area, you must sacrifice another. A balanced life often means lower overall output across all areas, while high achievement requires intense focus, leaving other areas neglected.
There are, however, a handful of strategies to help navigate managing the trade-off effectively.
- Seasons of Life: Instead of forcing balance simultaneously, focus on different burners during different life stages (e.g., focusing on career in your 20s, family later).
- Outsourcing: Hire help to take over tasks, effectively keeping a burner on by paying someone else to manage it.
- Combining Burners: Find ways to run burners together, such as working with friends or exercising with family.
- Boundaries: Setting rigid times to focus on specific burners, such as not bringing work home, ensures other burners get sufficient heat.
I'm bringing this up now because I feel like I have all 4 burners set on high, and I don't intend on turning any of them down.
By combining two popular frameworks, I've come up with my own method to help navigate this 48" Cooktop we call life without also feeling like I'm making significant sacrifices in either category.
1. Minimum Effective Dose:
The Minimum Effective Dose (MED) is a concept popularized by Tim Ferriss in "The 4-Hour Body" defined as the smallest input, effort, or dose required to produce a desired outcome. Anything beyond the MED is wasted effort, resources, or time. The core idea is to maximize results by doing the minimum necessary. It's a clever rebrand of the Pareto Principle (AKA 80/20 Rule).
2. Regret Minimization:
The Regret Minimization Framework, used by Jeff Bezos to decide to start Amazon, involves projecting oneself to age 80 and asking: "Will I regret not doing this?" This mental model prioritizes minimizing future regrets over inaction rather than avoiding short-term failure, focusing on long-term fulfillment.
Health:
Current MED for Health:
- 30-minute jog every morning
- 30-minute weightlifting session 4-5x/wk
- Weigh myself daily
- Same breakfast and lunch every day
- Rotate 5 meals for dinner every week
- 187.5g of protein per day + no more than 2,000 calories
- Supplement with Red Yeast Rice, Psyllium Husk, & Multi-vitamin
- Writing this newsletter (journaling) once / week
- Reading 1 book / month (learning)
My 2026 Misogi is to hit 4,000,000 steps. The 30-minute jog every morning makes my daily goal of 11,000 steps much easier to attain. Lifting weights for 30 minutes at a time felt silly at first, but it's all I can manage in this season of life. Something is better than nothing, and I know I'd regret waiting for the conditions on the field to change.
Family:
Current MED for Family:
- Make & eat breakfast w/ family every morning
- Dinner w/ family every evening
- ~Every pickup and dropoff
- ~Every birthday party / school event / Dr. or Dentist Apptmt
- See my parents 1x/week
- Dia's Mom stays with us for 2 months/year
- Mexico 1x/year
- See at least 1 cousin's family 1x/month
- See my sister 1x/year (lives v far away)
I've given myself the title of the undisputed heavyweight champion of spending time with my kids. I'm not the most patient dad. I'm not the best at princess tea parties or matchbox roadster racing, but I am damn near always in the room...
Watching... Waiting... Com.mis.er.a.ting! (Lots of crying at this stage, lol).
I don't want to look back at this stage of life and feel like I should have been around more.
Friends:
Current MED for Friends:
- Annual Vacations w/ a few distinct groups
- Quarterly Dinners w/ Penn State Bros
- Quarterly Workout w/ my work husbands - No Diddy
- Monthly Playdates w/ Kid's School Friends Families
- Monthly calls w/ my BiFF
- Bi-weekly hangs with my oldest friend's family
- ~Daily Calls w/ work husbands turned best buddies
I'm equally focused on preserving old friendships and nurturing new ones. It's not common to make new friends in your late 30's. Nor is it common to stay friends with the kids from your middle school lunch table. I'm extremely lucky to have the opportunity to do both, and I can't imagine turning that knob counterclockwise.
Work:
Current MED for work:
- Make three offers per week (to buy a house)
- Make one ask per week (to raise money)
I'm crushing both right metrics right now, but I don't want to increase them for fear of overdoing either.
I feel so lucky to have found my Ikigai.
My main focus at work is finding and funding deals. I'm not an expert at construction, nor do I pretend to be. My friends and family often call me to ask about things that break in their house, and I stare at them like a deer in headlights. I don't even own a hammer. 🤷🏽♂️
I am, however, really good at finding people who are on the fence about selling their home and slowly getting them to a point where they can't see themselves selling to anyone else.
I'm also performing well for my investors. My Repeat Customer Rate (RCR) is pretty high. I think only 2 people in the past 10 years haven't redeployed capital with me. Time to give them both a call. ☎️
Easier Said Than Done
On the surface, my life looks more like a complicated recipe than anything resembling free will. Every so often, I carefully select the ingredients I need to make an enjoyable meal and discard pretty much everything else.
It does, however, take a lot of discipline:
- Waking up at 5:30am every day to get a run in before the kids wake up means saying no to pretty much anything after 9pm.
- Keeping my weight below a certain # and hitting my protein target means saying no to most fun foods.
- Getting to 12 SFR development projects at a time means saying no to all other interesting money-making opportunities thrown my way.
This operating system isn't for everyone. In fact, I'm sure some reading this are thinking it sounds miserable - like, Damn! That's a lot of rules to follow. And it's true, a lot of my decisions are pre-made and binary. There are things that I do, and things that I don't. Luckily for me, I'm happiest when I'm in a prison of my own making.
✌🏽&❤️