The same day I received a job offer at the Transportation Research Board in Washington, D.C., my wife came home early with news: we were expecting our first child.
When I told her I was going to take the job, she looked at me and said, “You must not love me or our unborn child if you’re going to take that job in D.C.” I passed it off as her being dramatic, or the fact that she does not like change.
This was my dream job. When I started my career I had four grand goals: work in the private sector, work in the public sector, work on the same issue at the national level, then start my own firm and/or teach at a university.
At this point in the journey I had checked off the first two goals on the list, and the opportunity to look at transportation infrastructure from the national level was exactly what I needed, or at least that is what I said I wanted.
I took the job anyway.
What followed looked impressive on paper: leaving before sunrise, returning after sunset, traveling the country, checking every box on my carefully mapped career trajectory.
And completely failing my family.
How can building a successful career be failing my family?
One thing my wife mentioned when telling me that I did not love her or our child is that I would not be present for them. She was telling the truth I didn’t want to hear at the time. With a 1.5 to 2 hour commute each way, I wasn’t there.
I was trying to follow all of the best productivity advice, and I would hear people talk about work-life balance, but it just seemed like a non-starter for me, a busy professional with a young family. It seemed to me that all of the advice fell on the same solution: spend more time with your family, focus on your family. There did not seem to be anything on how to have success in both areas at the same time.
In fact, when asked if I thought I needed work-life balance, my answer was no, because in my mind work and life didn’t balance. They were competing for the same resources: my time, energy, and attention.
Here is what I did not see at the time. My career goals were written down. Private sector, public sector, the national level, then my own firm or a university. At home, what I had were intentions. Be a provider. Be a husband. Be a dad. Be healthy. That was the extent of it. I knew what I intended, but I had never created a goal that would attach any accountability to it.
Conceptually I understood what was meant by balance, but I did not want to balance. I wanted to win. That led me to start asking myself three questions that changed everything for me.
Do you want to win at work?
Do you want to win at home?
Are you winning at work and home?
The first two questions were easy. I don’t know too many people who do not want to be successful at work or at home, and I answered yes to both without hesitating. The third one is where it fell apart. I could not say yes, and it took me a while to understand why. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about home. It was that the two lists were never asked to fit together. The first two questions asked about things I had already thought about separately. The third one asked about them together, and there was no plan for together.
Those questions helped to provide awareness of the work-life balance myth, and an alternative perspective on what it is trying to achieve.
The Myth of Static Balance
Traditional work-life balance suggests you should dedicate equal time and energy to work and personal life every single day. Picture a perfectly balanced scale: 50% work, 50% everything else. Sounds reasonable, right? Except it’s completely divorced from reality.
When I had my two-hour commute and a full 8 to 10 hours of work on top of that, there was not enough time in the day to provide another 10 to 12 hours toward my personal life, especially when you consider sleep.
Real life doesn’t operate on neat percentages. The static balance model sets you up to feel like you’re constantly failing. Every late night at the office becomes evidence that you’re “bad at balance.” Every family dinner interrupted by an urgent call reinforces the narrative that you can’t win at both work and home.
This led me to the concept of Dynamic Balance and the Bicycle Principle, a model that helped me design and live a life where I could win at work and home.
Dynamic Balance: The Bicycle Principle
When you’re on a bike, you don’t achieve balance by staying perfectly still. You stay upright through constant motion and continuous micro-adjustments. You lean slightly left, then correct right. You shift your weight, adjust your speed, and respond to the terrain ahead.
Dynamic Balance comes through movement, awareness, and adaptation, not from finding a perfect position and freezing there.
My career and life worked the same way. Some weeks I had to lean harder into work because a major project demanded it. Other weeks I had to shift toward family time because my kids needed more of my presence. I found that the key wasn’t maintaining perfect daily equilibrium. It was making conscious adjustments that kept me moving toward my overall goals without crashing.
Dynamic Balance rests on three things. Situational awareness, an honest read of what this season actually requires of you and where you can adjust to keep moving forward. Conscious adjustment, where every adjustment you make should be intentional, because you are constantly looking ahead to see what you need to do. You see the hill before you reach it and shift gears then, not after you have stalled on the grade. And recovery, built into the design rather than something you get to once the pressure lets up, because some corners are blind and you need margin for the terrain you could not see coming.
Dynamic Balance isn’t about lowering your standards or accepting mediocrity in any area of your life. It’s about recognizing that sustaining what you’ve built requires the same kind of dynamic adjustment that keeps a bicycle upright and moving forward. The bicycle will take you exactly where you need to go.
It is difficult to design a solution for a problem that is not defined. Put another way, you can’t design for a win until you define what winning is for you.
When you consider work and life, what does winning look like? It comes down to one question. What do you want?
You might say that you want it all. Great. Now let’s design for you to achieve that.
What needs to be in place in order for you to be successful at work and home? Not one or the other, but in both places.
I want you to win by design.
P.S. Do you have goals for life outside of work? Hit reply and tell me.