286: The Brutal Truth About Success That No One Talks About – My Take On The 4 Burners Theory

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The Four Burners Theory says that to be successful you must cut off one of the four burners in your life, and to be really successful you must cut off two. The four burners are family, friends, health, and work.

My friend James Clear introduced this idea to me at one of Billy Murphy’s mancations, and I revisited it recently with Mike Jackness down in San Diego. It is the clearest framework I know for thinking about the tradeoffs behind work-life balance.

Below is how I actually rank my own burners, why I deliberately limit growth on my ecommerce store, and the two ways the theory bends without breaking.

Key takeaways

• The Four Burners Theory: family, friends, health, and work. Cut one to succeed, cut two to really succeed.
• My order is family first, health and work nearly tied, friends last.
• Health is the burner that raises the intensity of every other burner. Losing 35 pounds made me substantially more productive.
• Tearing my Achilles in 2017 made it one of my least productive years, because I could not exercise and got depressed.
• My wife and I deliberately avoid explosive growth on our store, because we fight more when business spikes than when it is steady.
• The burners are dynamic. Turning one off hard for a year is different from turning it off permanently.
• Bumble Bee Linens succeeded because we shut off the friends burner completely for about a year at the start.
• Outsourcing helps and does not solve everything, since it can take you away from things you actually enjoy.

What is the Four Burners Theory?

Imagine your life as a stove with four burners, each representing one major area. The first burner is family, the second is friends, the third is health, and the fourth is work.

The theory holds that succeeding requires cutting off at least one burner, and real success requires cutting off two. There is only so much time in a day.

I talk about work-life balance constantly and I keep striving for it, and life is genuinely full of tradeoffs. Growing a business to eight or nine figures means family or friends suffer.

That is why so many entrepreneurs are lonely and depressed while making enormous amounts of money. They gave up a great deal to get there.

The reverse is equally true. Choosing more time with family, friends, or your health means your business will not be as successful.

The question the theory forces is a real one. Would you rather live an unbalanced life where you dominate one area, or a balanced life that never reaches your full potential?

Why family is my top burner

Family is my first burner without hesitation. My kids are effectively little businesses that demand constant attention.

Babies were ironically easier. They could not walk or talk, I was not managing their education, and I was not shuttling them between activities.

Now a good portion of my time goes to coaching them in volleyball and basketball, helping with homework, and Russian math, which I catch a surprising amount of flak for.

My rule is never missing any of their activities. My own parents worked most of the time, and while I appreciate everything they did to raise me and send me to a great college, I wish we had spent more time together.

Kids notice this. Miss a soccer game or an important event and they will remember it.

My daughter recently performed in a sound and music production at her school and I was in the front row for every performance, taking pictures and video and embarrassing her by shouting her name. She will remember that I was there.

Why health raises the intensity of every other burner

Health is my second burner, essentially tied with work, and I put it first of the two because being healthy, fit, and well-rested increases what you can achieve across all the other burners combined.

Five years ago I was badly out of shape, peaking around 190 pounds. I tired easily, which made me less productive at work and often left me too exhausted after a full day to see friends at all.

Going on a low carb diet took 35 pounds off in about four months and gave me significant energy back. I stopped getting food comas and became far more productive across the board.

This is why I think health is the key to maximizing everything else. You cannot accomplish anything while sick.

In 2017 I tore my Achilles tendon and it became one of the least productive years of my life. I could not exercise, so I stayed in bed watching Netflix and got depressed quickly.

Why I deliberately limit growth on my ecommerce store

My wife and I intentionally do not push the accelerator all the way down on Bumble Bee Linens, because two things happen whenever sales jump dramatically. Everyone wants explosive growth, and doubling or tripling has been genuinely stressful every time it has happened to us.

You do not have enough staff and you do not have the infrastructure for the volume. Those spikes are also frequently short-lived, which makes the stress worse rather than better.

We sell personal products, so we cannot easily hand fulfillment to a 3PL. My wife gets stressed by the fulfillment load and so do I.

The pattern we noticed is that we fight considerably more when business is very good than when it is steady. So we aim for steady growth that is manageable from both a stress and a cash flow standpoint.

Our seven-figure store already makes more than we spend, and that is before counting MyWifeQuitHerJob.com.

Why the blog and course feed my health burner instead of draining it

MyWifeQuitHerJob.com works differently from the store. Teaching people to sell is genuinely rewarding, I enjoy public speaking, and I like running my own event.

More business from the blog makes it more enjoyable rather than more stressful, because it means helping more people. That is the opposite of how the store behaves.

I still drop work for my kids without hesitation and take a break to work out every single day.

My arrangement is to use the ecommerce store as a laboratory: try every new ecommerce tool and marketing strategy on it and report the results. Bumble Bee Linens is effectively a crash test dummy.

I almost never accept a podcast or conference sponsor unless I have used the tool in my own shop or a close colleague recommends it. That is why my recommendations are worth something.

What genuinely irritates me is the volume of online service reviews written purely to rank in search by people who have obviously never used the tool. You only learn a tool’s actual problems by running it yourself, because every tool has them.

The net effect is lower stress on the physical products side, which frees me to do what I am best at, which is experimenting and learning how to grow ecommerce businesses.

Why friends is my lowest burner

Friends is my fourth burner, and I value my friendships genuinely. When things go badly I turn into a hermit and stop talking to anyone.

2017 was exactly that, bedridden and depressed and out of contact. I will always show up for a friend in an emergency, and I may be out of touch for ordinary hanging out when I am stressed or working hard on family, business, or health.

Where the Four Burners Theory bends

I believe the theory to a point, and it is not black and white. My business partner Toni Anderson does not believe it at all, and she somehow runs all four burners at once.

The first place it bends is that burners interact rather than operating independently. Improving your health burner raises the intensity of all the others, which increases your total capacity rather than just redistributing it.

A strong friends burner can produce a workout buddy who improves your health, or people who help you in a crisis and improve everything else. A weak family burner means fighting at home, which damages your productivity and your work.

That has happened repeatedly with my wife and me and our business. It always comes back around.

The burners are dynamic, not permanent

The second place the theory bends is time. You can adjust burners up and down freely, exactly like a real stove, across a week, a month, or a year.

My own schedule: Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday are work days from about 9am to 2pm, and I speak to nobody during them. Tuesdays and Thursdays are health days, ultimate frisbee and tennis respectively. Nights and weekends are family and friends only, with no work.

My friend Andrew Youderian runs a different pattern, devoting an entire year to going hard on his business and then relaxing.

Bumble Bee Linens succeeded out of the gate specifically because my wife and I shut off the friends burner when we started. We stopped going out, stopped watching TV, and worked nights and weekends at 100% on the business.

The health burner was low then too, since neither of us was exercising. Those burners were off for roughly a year, until the business was on its feet.

Going all in on one burner for a short period achieves far more than running everything at moderate intensity indefinitely. It is the same principle as focus in business: be excellent at one thing rather than mediocre across several.

How to keep more burners running at once

Hiring people is the most direct way to keep all four going. For a while we had a chef cook all our food through a cook share arrangement with four families, where the housekeeper cooked once and delivered the same meals to everyone, which split the cost enough that it was not expensive.

A housekeeper comes every other week. We pay a driver to take the kids from elementary school to their after-school program, which stops my workday from being interrupted at 12 or 2:30 on half days.

The same logic applies to business, where hiring employees reduces your load and adds its own stresses. Parenting has nannies.

Why outsourcing does not solve everything

Outsourcing can take you away from things you genuinely enjoy. I love driving my kids around, because the car is where I get all the gossip.

Ask them directly how school was and I get “good, we learned about science.” Put their friends in the back seat and I become a fly on the wall for the real conversation.

The same applies to business. I get bored if I outsource things I actually like doing, which for me includes Photoshop and sometimes video and podcast editing.

Be careful what you hand off.

Being ruthlessly efficient with your time

The other way to cheat the theory is efficiency. We all waste time on TV, games, and general goofing off, and I just finished a hundred hour-long episodes of Fringe over winter break.

For work, take on only the projects that maximize your gains or your happiness. I recently went through everything I am working on and cut down to those two criteria.

That is exactly what we do at Bumble Bee Linens by focusing on event planners and wedding planners, who spend the most with us.

If you feel like you are on a hamster wheel serving every customer, go through your customer list and identify your best ones: the people who do not complain, who spend money, and who are generally happy. Focus your time there and ignore the difficult ones.

I do this with my course. When a student asks questions covered in the first videos, that tells me they are not trying, and I have preemptively refunded people on a number of occasions including recently.

For health, I do the bare minimum focused on isolating key muscle groups. Ultimate gives the best cardio per unit of injury risk since it is non-contact, and tennis on Thursdays is a sport with no physical contact that you can play into old age. My dad played until he was 70.

The principle across all of it is working smarter rather than harder. When I sit down to work, noise-canceling headphones go on and nothing interrupts me, and when I watch a hundred episodes of Fringe I do that with the same single-mindedness.

Have I actually cheated the system?

I do not think I have. If I put all my chips down, I could probably have built an eight or even nine figure business, particularly with my contacts in the VC industry.

The question is what those gains would have cost. I already do not spend the money I earn, and with my burners set as they are I am happy with two seven-figure businesses.

I make more than I can spend, I never miss my kids’ activities, and I have enough projects to stay engaged. The unexpected bonus is that my work produces friends everywhere, so I can email ahead to almost any state and meet up with someone.

The failure mode I see constantly is entrepreneurs crushing it online while unhappy or permanently stressed, because they forgot why they started. For my wife and me it is the family burner.

The question worth asking yourself is whether you are turning off your other burners to grow your business purely for growth’s sake. If you already make significantly more than you spend and you are still not satisfied, revisit your priorities and find your why.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Four Burners Theory?

It compares your life to a stove with four burners representing family, friends, health, and work. The theory holds that being successful requires cutting off one burner, and being very successful requires cutting off two.

Who created the Four Burners Theory?

Steve Chou was introduced to it by James Clear at one of Billy Murphy’s mancations. It is a widely discussed framework for thinking about the tradeoffs behind work-life balance.

Can you keep all four burners running at once?

Partially, through hiring help and being ruthlessly efficient with your time. Steve’s business partner Toni Anderson runs all four, though Steve’s own view is that the tradeoffs are real and you eventually have to choose priorities.

Which burner should you prioritize?

Steve argues for health, because being fit and well-rested increases what you can achieve across every other burner. He lost 35 pounds on a low carb diet and became substantially more productive as a result.

Do the four burners affect each other?

Yes, which is where the theory bends. A strong friends burner can produce a workout partner who improves your health, while a weak family burner produces conflict at home that damages your work.

Should you always aim for fast business growth?

Not necessarily. Steve deliberately limits growth on his ecommerce store because sales spikes outrun his staffing and infrastructure, and he and his wife fight noticeably more when business booms than when it is steady.

Does outsourcing solve the four burners problem?

Only partly. Hiring a chef, housekeeper, driver, or employees keeps more burners running, and outsourcing can also remove activities you genuinely enjoy, like driving your kids around or editing your own video.

Is it better to focus on one burner or balance all four?

Going all in on a single burner for a short defined period achieves far more than running everything at moderate intensity indefinitely. Bumble Bee Linens succeeded because Steve and his wife shut off their friends burner completely for about a year.