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SPECIAL EPISODE: Insights on Embracing Imbalance with Curt Roberts
5 Plays3 years ago
Trying to manage your personal and professional life is a delicate balancing act. And part of being an entrepreneur means sacrificing your personal time for success. Is there a way to achieve that ideal balance? We're talking with someone who strives for intentional living and believes that the perfect balance is found by embracing imbalance. Join us in today's conversation with investor Curt Roberts of Kickstart (a VC firm for startups in Utah, Colorado, and the Mountain West) for a special episode of Perfect Pitch. In this episode, we'll talk about:
Why Curt believes balance is never achievable, and how you can choose your imbalance to discover a "healthy tension" between priorities
The art of saying "no" and Curt's experience with his depression diagnosis
How to determine a hierarchy of priorities
The practice of compartmentalizing our time, rather than striving for balance
Recommended
Transcript
Balancing Personal and Professional Life
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Trying to manage your personal and professional life is a delicate balancing act.
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And part of being an entrepreneur means sacrificing your personal time for success.
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Is there a way to achieve that ideal balance?
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We're talking with someone who strives for intentional living and believes that the perfect balance is actually found by embracing imbalance.
Introduction of Kurt Roberts
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Join us in today's conversation with investor Kurt Roberts for a special episode of Perfect Pitch.
Kurt's Career Journey
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Perfect Pitch is a podcast from Kickstart that reveals the minds of both investors and entrepreneurs throughout a startup's journey.
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I'm your host, Karen Zelnick.
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Kurt, thank you so much for being here today.
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You've been our investor expert on past episodes, but we haven't had a chance to dive deep into your story yet.
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But before we get into the conversation, I do want to cover highlights of your career, which could honestly take the entire podcast in and of itself because they have been many and they've been amazing.
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But in brief, after graduating from Harvard Business School, you started your career as a consultant and
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You later became the chairman and CEO of Peace Health and then went on to lead strategy at Nike where you worked on some really cool projects.
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You're currently on the board of at least 13 companies where you're able to support founders and their teams through their growth, development, and success.
Educational Priorities and Intentional Decisions
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You enjoy cycling, skiing, photography, and collecting rare antiquarian books.
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And our favorite question, what else should listeners know about you?
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When I was a high school student, I didn't care at all about high school.
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I was like a C average student.
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And all I did was work to earn money, which I then used for skiing and dating.
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When I got into college, though, I went through a two-year period in my sophomore and junior years where I didn't go on a single date, which was very unusual to my parents.
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They wondered if I was like ill.
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But it had an objective in mind, which was I really wanted to go to a top-notch graduate school.
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And so I wanted no distractions.
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Well, dating can definitely be very distracting.
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It was to me.
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You did go to a top-notch graduate school.
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So that works.
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Yeah, it seemed to work.
Choosing Imbalances Intentionally
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That's great.
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We're going to dive into the topic now, which is we talk a lot about burnout on this podcast.
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There's no shortage of advice out there for founders or really anyone on finding balance in your life.
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But I know that you have a very particular stance on achieving perfect balance.
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Tell us about your stance on finding balance.
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Well, this is a realization that didn't come until later in my career.
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But once it came, it created a clarity for me, which allowed me to kind of let go of
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a lot of the guilt I had felt at earlier stages for feeling like I was a bit imbalanced.
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And it's a relatively simple insight.
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Balance is honestly never achievable.
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That is not a problem per se.
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Imbalance is a reality, I think, for anyone who is pursuing a professional career or motivated to achieve in their lives and has passions and commitments that they want to be serious about.
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So the problem isn't that imbalance exists.
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The problem is if you don't choose your imbalance, you
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And instead, you allow your imbalance to choose you.
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That's when tragedy can happen.
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So that's kind of the philosophy at a simple level over the course of a person's life and certainly over the course of my life.
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What I've tried to do is choose those imbalances very carefully and recognizing that they will change and that as long as I'm the one who
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intentionally making that change, then the resulting imbalance is actually just fine and healthy.
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I appreciated that you brought that up.
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There are so many pieces that I want to dive into and we will get to that.
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But I first want to say that even though you said it's a relatively simple insight, I think one, it's very profound, but it also, there are many people who would disagree.
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Many people who would insist that balance is possible.
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What would you say to them?
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I would say there is no free lunch in life.
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For a while, earlier in my career, what I assumed was the way to address the problem of trying to achieve balance was simply to remove hours of sleep that I could pursue the hobbies I want.
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that I could spend all of the time that I thought was appropriate to be a great father and husband, that I could be outstanding in my job, that I could make meaningful contributions in the community, that I could pursue other aspects of my life that I was either told I should or that I felt intrinsically that I needed to.
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But realized that at some point, the only way to accommodate all those things was to get less sleep.
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And once I reached the point where the sleep had gone down to like five hours a night or six hours a night on a good night, and living with the consequences of that choice was when I realized that something had to give.
Adapting Priorities with Life Changes
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Either I was going to do something in a significantly less committed or mediocre way, or I would intentionally take things off the plate, even if that meant that there was some level of imbalance that would be the result.
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So apart from lack of sleep, what are other dangers of trying to fit perfect balance into your life?
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Here's what I think one of the most natural consequences is, is that you will end up finding that you don't optimize for anything.
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Meaning you do a minimally acceptable job at all of the things you've decided to load onto your plate, all of the roles that you play in your life.
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And maybe better than a minimally acceptable job at some, but what you'll feel like is you're mediocre at everything and not great at anything.
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And different chapters in life present different opportunities for prioritization.
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Those opportunities come quite naturally.
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Again, my belief is that as long as you're making those choices intentionally, you
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then you're very comfortable or you're significantly more comfortable with the consequences of those choices.
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I have chosen different imbalances in different chapters.
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I could say my life has gone through at least four or five very distinct chapters.
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And in each one, I was making a decision on imbalance that had predictable consequences, but for which I was optimizing for something that really mattered at that time.
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So I actually would suggest that we rephrase it.
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You're not actually looking for balance, but you're looking for a healthy tension between the priorities and making sure that that tension is something that you choose.
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And so if that perfect balance isn't possible and we're going for that healthy tension, how have you maintained that healthy tension between priorities?
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The only thing I've been able to do really, I think, with any success is simply to recognize that I can make choices that sub-optimize for some things and do so without guilt.
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I had a founder ask me the other day, just as one example, we got on a topic in a meeting about talking about my passion for cycling and that I've been able through...
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dedicating a lot of time to that, plus other things related to physical activity.
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I've been able to reach a level of health and fitness that I probably hadn't had for decades previously.
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And the person was asking me, how do you do this?
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My response was not what they wanted to hear, but my response was basically, let your kids grow up and get out of the house and then you'll be able to do it.
Overcoming the Difficulty of Saying No
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You know, it's like there is no easy answer when you've made the choice to have important commitments in your life that have deep, deep meaning and for which you don't want to make decisions.
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compromises that might have a lasting result that you won't find acceptable.
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And so I am optimizing.
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I have the ability to optimize for my health now in a way that I have not been able to do in prior chapters.
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And that's okay.
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I think we all need advice from you on how to not feel guilty.
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I remember actually when we first started working together, you recommended a book called When I Say No, I Feel Guilty or something like that.
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Yes.
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Actually, I would love to talk about how you... How did you become comfortable learning how to say no to things?
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It's extremely hard.
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And it took a wake-up call, honestly, for me to do that.
Mental and Physical Health Importance
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That wake-up call came three years or so into my career as a CEO in healthcare.
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The job itself was extraordinarily demanding.
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It was not uncommon for me to have scheduled meetings at 6.30 in the morning.
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And for meetings, again, on the back end of the day to be scheduled for 6 or 6.30 in the evening.
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Because the company I was running at the time was the largest employer in a multi-county area in Oregon, the job also came with expectations about community involvement.
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And so at this time, my wife, Marcia, and I were chairing a nonprofit that was...
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focused on good, healthy early parenting for at-risk kids.
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I was the chair of the United Way board.
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I had accepted very significant responsibility in my church.
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We had three young children.
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And I was in a meeting one morning where I thought I was
00:10:26
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Fine.
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And a very aware, observant person who was sitting across the table from me, for whom I now have very deep gratitude, said to me, out of the blue, Kurt, you're depressed.
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Wow.
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And my response was, what are you talking about?
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And the person rattled off some observations as a result of those observations.
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I decided that I actually would go see someone to see if, in fact, that was true and responded to this questionnaire that seeks to make this assessment.
00:11:03
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And lo and behold, that was actually the case.
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Finding out that I had depression was devastating.
00:11:14
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The reason for that, I think as much as anything, was this happened in a time when mental health was not seen in the same way as physical health.
00:11:24
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Problems with physical health were accepted as a normal part of human growth, development, and aging.
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Mental health was not seen in the same way.
00:11:36
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Mental health problems were seen as a sign of weakness or as the consequence of poor choices.
00:11:44
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To be diagnosed with major depression caused me to go into a period of a lot of introspection and a voracious amount of reading just to try to understand what's actually going on here and should I be judging myself for having had this problem?
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fortunately, what I was able to learn was that in my case, there probably is a pretty significant genetic component to this and that there are solutions that existed and that I had every right to seek with no sense of self-judgment.
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And for me,
00:12:28
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The solution has included not just an ongoing medication regimen, but it has included changing the way I structure my calendar.
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It has included a very regular regimen of exercise.
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It's included not allowing...
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myself to do work right up until I go to bed.
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And the solution won't be the same for everyone.
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And for me, it's taken years to figure out that formula and I don't always get it right.
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But I think at least now I get it right more often than not.
00:13:00
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In trying to formulate a response to get back to full health, I had an executive coach at the time that was really, really effective.
00:13:09
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And he diagnosed that one of my problems was that I had no ability to say no and recommended that book.
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And I read that book.
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And I would say, I haven't always been good since then at saying no, but with the progressing of time, I've gotten way, way better at it.
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Things that I would have never said no to earlier in my life, I routinely say no to now.
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Again, I'm disappointing people when I do that.
00:13:36
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But it's because I have an equation, a life equation that I'm trying to optimize for.
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And so I've chosen my priorities and I'm accepting the consequences of that choice.
Life in Chapters and Career Reflections
00:13:48
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I'm grateful you shared that story, Kurt.
00:13:50
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You have to become very comfortable with the ability to stop shooting yourself.
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Like I should say it.
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I should do this.
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And instead be comfortable with the language of I want to do this.
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This fits in my goal right now.
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I will do this.
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It's a lot of work.
00:14:07
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Everyone was saying it's possible, but it takes a lot of practice.
00:14:09
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As with any art form, I think saying no is an art form more than a science.
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And so I think it takes a lot of practice.
00:14:15
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I believe that's correct.
00:14:16
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Right around that same time period, I had a friend who attended a conference and he came back from this conference and we were talking afterwards.
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I said, what was the most interesting thing you heard or learned at this conference?
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And he said, there's this line I will never forget, which is, don't let anybody should on you.
00:14:36
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And that's exactly right.
00:14:38
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It's a pithy kind of fun way to teach an important principle, which is you decide your priorities.
00:14:45
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Other people should not decide those for you.
00:14:48
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Yeah, absolutely.
00:14:50
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So the idea of balancing your life suggests that a person doesn't need to choose between competing priorities, that they can have it all.
00:14:56
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And we've discussed and we know that that's not possible.
00:14:59
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So for our listeners who want to give 110% to everything that they do, how do you determine the hierarchy of priorities?
00:15:06
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I think the best way to approach this is to think of your life as coming in natural chapters.
00:15:14
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There was a time in my life, for example, that I was highly imbalanced as a student, highly imbalanced.
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I made a choice to prioritize my performance and
00:15:28
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as a student, because the outcome that I would get from that deeply mattered to me.
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And I knew that without making choices that would allow me to be an imbalanced person as a student, that I wouldn't get the outcome I wanted.
00:15:47
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The next chapter in my life that came after that was the choice of imbalance, an intentional choice of imbalance in my career.
00:15:56
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In the early stages, I think, of anyone's career, you're laying the foundation for everything that will come after.
00:16:02
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I've always tried to reinforce to my kids that
00:16:06
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that choices compound over time.
00:16:08
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The choices you make early establish a platform on which you build, and that it's very hard to get those years back.
00:16:16
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Those early decisions that I made, they came with consequences.
00:16:21
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For example, during a period of several years, I didn't spend as much time exercising, almost any time exercising.
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I spent a lot of time on the road.
00:16:31
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Again, they were choices that
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we made intentionally and that I had to negotiate with the people whose lives I was going to be affecting by those choices, most particularly my family.
00:16:42
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At a later chapter in life, as I was contemplating whether to stay at Nike or to pursue a new chapter, I made an imbalance choice.
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And the imbalance choice I made at that time was to be an extremely available father.
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My kids were getting into their teenage years.
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And I knew that those years were going to be critically important.
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More important, I thought, than when they were three or five or seven.
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And so I stepped out of what was an amazing career and an amazing company and took a position in higher education that would allow me to work
00:17:24
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40-hour weeks, pretty consistently.
00:17:27
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I took a huge pay cut and put my career to the side.
00:17:33
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Not that I was not going to do a very good job in the position that I accepted in higher education, but that I accepted a position that would have significantly fewer demands on my time.
00:17:46
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And as a result, I was able to have a period of about seven years of
00:17:50
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where I was an incredibly involved dad and we bought season ski passes and I taught all three of my kids to ski and we had an incredible amount of time together.
00:18:06
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And then when my last child left home, I made a new imbalance decision, which was to enter venture capital.
00:18:15
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And again, put myself in a position where I was all in on something professional.
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that for me would also serve other really important needs that I had at the time, the need to be an owner in a company.
00:18:28
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But even more importantly, I wanted at this chapter of my career to really try to develop people in a way that others had invested in me when I was young.
00:18:42
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Supporting entrepreneurs is a great way to do that.
00:18:44
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And so it's a new imbalance.
00:18:47
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And again, an intentional choice when other needs were not as critical in my life.
00:18:53
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And I could make that choice feeling that it was a healthy one and a good one for what I wanted.
00:19:00
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I can imagine that when you're making these choices of imbalance, the anticipated consequences of imbalance can seem a little bit daunting or a little bit scary or a little bit like, oh, I'm not sure I want that consequence.
00:19:13
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But I'd love to know, in hindsight, have the consequences seemed as bad or do you regret any of it?
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It would be tempting to look back and say, I made all those choices correctly and I have no regrets.
00:19:27
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Life is never that simple.
00:19:29
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I could say during the period that I was in higher education and I had chosen the imbalance of family for that period of time, I very frequently wondered, have I made a choice that I
00:19:43
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will make it impossible for me to ever go back into a new chapter of my career where I can really use in a more intense way all of the talents that I thought I had developed.
00:19:58
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And will I be perceived negatively?
00:20:00
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Would people say, oh, look, you know, he had one of the greatest jobs we could ever imagine.
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He just walked away from it.
00:20:09
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Maybe he couldn't hack it.
00:20:10
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You know, those thoughts crossed my mind many, many times.
00:20:14
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Fortunately, Kickstart took a chance on me, even though I'd spent seven years in higher education, and it wasn't the least bit obvious that this was a job that I could figure out, let alone do well.
00:20:25
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So my worst fears didn't materialize.
00:20:28
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But absolutely, I was very concerned at the time that I would not get my career mojo back.
00:20:36
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And there was clearly some possibility that that
00:20:39
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Might have been the case.
00:20:40
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So I accepted the imbalance, but I didn't do so without a lot of stress.
00:20:46
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Kurt, I think you highlighted two very important things.
00:20:49
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One is there was still some worry there.
00:20:51
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You're not going to know you're making the right decision because there's no concern.
00:20:54
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There's no worry there.
00:20:56
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That's going to be present and being aware that that worry and those concerns will still be present and being able to move forward anyway.
00:21:01
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And I also love that you brought up an example where you realize that a lot of these decisions, they're not irreparable.
00:21:08
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I think those are two very important points when people are deciding the hierarchy of their priorities and how to do that and how to establish that.
00:21:16
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Decisions do have consequences.
00:21:18
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All of us have to make those decisions with imperfect information.
00:21:22
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We don't know how those choices will play out over the long term.
00:21:26
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I've had the good fortune.
00:21:28
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I do really consider it to be fortune.
00:21:30
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This is not me having done all the right things and therefore merited the career that I've had.
00:21:36
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But I've had the good fortune, I think, of being able...
00:21:39
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to make these choices of prioritizing different things along the way and still have it work out.
00:21:48
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That said, I won't say that's always going to be the outcome.
00:21:52
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And so for anyone that's facing these kinds of choices, if you accept that imbalance is real and that perfect balance is hard, if not impossible, just know that you can only make those decisions with the best information you have.
00:22:07
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And fortunately,
Negotiating Priorities with Family
00:22:09
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the best information you have is pretty good.
00:22:13
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You do have good insights about what matters most to you at any point in time.
00:22:19
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And all you can do is make the choice to say, what matters most is what I will focus on.
00:22:25
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And that might mean that other things are going to get less energy and therefore less than my best.
00:22:34
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while you won't know what the consequences will be in all respects, you can do so, I think, with a clear conscience that you made the best choice you could because you were choosing what that priority was.
00:22:49
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I want to talk a little bit about tension points because for founders, a particular tension is trying to balance work and home life.
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And it's easy for those two to bleed together.
00:23:00
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Do you think it's possible to build separation between the two?
00:23:03
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I think the idea of complete separation is probably impossible, meaning starting a company and building a company will result in very unpredictable demands.
00:23:17
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Guaranteed.
00:23:19
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The path of building a company comes with a lot of twists and turns, and they will not and cannot come at times when you want them to.
00:23:28
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That's not the way building things works.
00:23:33
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So those things come and they will impose on your time and they will require weekend phone calls and evening commitments and unexpected impositions that you just have to deal with.
00:23:50
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I like the idea of generally trying to compartmentalize our time.
00:23:54
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I do like the idea of trying to say, look, for some period at night, I'm not going to check my email, for example.
00:24:01
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or that very important commitments I will always meet that have to do with family or friends or other things that matter to you.
00:24:10
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But just know that life's not that simple.
00:24:14
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And there will be times when you will feel very badly about missing something.
00:24:20
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But I will say, again, as long as you've had an intentional conversation, both with yourself and with those that you care most about that are also dealing with the consequences of those choices,
00:24:34
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and you're negotiating it together, and you're self-reflective, and you're paying attention to how those things are playing out and what those consequences are, you'll make the right adjustments at the right time.
00:24:47
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And the people you care about most, because you've been willing to negotiate those together, I think will feel respected and will have a lot more understanding and patience when those impositions come.
00:25:01
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I have a recent example, less than six months ago here at Kickstart, where I've made an imbalance choice where I'm going to prioritize this career.
00:25:11
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I also have a few other things I've prioritized, including a couple of hobbies and my physical health.
00:25:18
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I reached a point where I found myself experiencing what felt like kind of a breaking point.
00:25:25
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So I had allowed the imbalance to get out of whack, completely out of whack.
00:25:30
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I sat down with the other partners here at Kickstart, explained what was going on, really kind of poured my heart out a little bit as to how I was feeling.
00:25:41
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And we intentionally reprioritized things.
00:25:43
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We took things off my plate and other members of the team picked them up.
00:25:47
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And I'm very grateful that they would.
00:25:50
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So in spite of all my
00:25:52
Speaker
grand proclamations about choosing your imbalance and then making it all work.
00:25:57
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It wasn't working.
00:25:58
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And so even with the best of intentions, these problems will sneak up on you and you just can't let them become catastrophic.
00:26:06
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I'd experienced that once with severe depression.
00:26:10
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So the warning signs were there and I needed to not allow that to happen again.
Learning from Others and Conclusion
00:26:18
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Thank you for sharing that.
00:26:20
Speaker
That reminded me of... Jim Collins said it at some point, but he was talking about the people who prevail in the hard circumstances and things.
00:26:26
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They're the people who confront the most brutal facts of their current reality, and they just move forward with them.
00:26:33
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So I like that even though this is something you focus on, and I would have just assumed you nailed it, but you're still working on figuring out that balance and figuring that out in your life.
00:26:42
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And we're all going to just have to keep doing that.
00:26:44
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We want to end with that question that we love to ask everybody.
00:26:47
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And that is, Kurt, what's an effective practice you've implemented in your work or personal life that has had a great impact on your success?
00:26:55
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I learned something when I was in my early 20s that I've tried to practice ever since.
00:27:02
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And that is that every person I meet has something to teach me.
00:27:08
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Even if the person is someone that I would not run into in a normal course of life, it could literally be someone I meet on a train or a plane or someone with whom I have almost nothing in common.
00:27:21
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I've learned over the long term that literally everyone has something to teach me.
00:27:26
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And what I'd like to hope I've become to some extent over the years is a continuously improving amalgam
00:27:36
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of the best attributes of the people that I've known and trusted and gotten the chance to know over the course of my life.
00:27:46
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What I hope will continue to be the case is that I will do that up until the day I die.
00:27:53
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That's such a beautiful concept.
00:27:55
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I think that's what we can all hope for, that we all want to be.
00:27:58
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So thank you so much for sharing that insight and also all the things that we've talked about in this podcast.
00:28:02
Speaker
It's been a very rich, engaging, and thought-provoking discussion.
00:28:07
Speaker
Thank you for being here and thank you for all that you shared.
00:28:10
Speaker
Thank you, Karen.
00:28:11
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And of course, thank you for listening as we dive deep into what it takes to create the perfect pitch.
00:28:17
Speaker
If you want to learn more about our investor, Kurt Roberts from Kickstart, we'll have a link to his profile and a longer bio in our show notes at kickstartfund.com.
00:28:25
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You can listen to more episodes of Perfect Pitch wherever you listen to your podcast.
00:28:28
Speaker
And if you like what you're learning, leave us a reviewer rating.
00:28:32
Speaker
We'll be back next time with more insights from entrepreneurs and the investors who fund them.
00:28:36
Speaker
So be sure to subscribe so you don't miss a thing.