How to WORK with your partner, CRUSH your career and NOT break up

I can think of precious few ways to end a relationship in flaming disaster faster than trying to work with your partner. To work well with your significant other, you must each play a clearly defined role. You're going to have to integrate two entirely contradictory modes of being. Mode one, being a life partner. Mode two, being a business partner. Completely different rules apply. As one small example, if I walk by my wife and don't run my hand lovingly across her bum, she'll actually comment on her disappointment. If I do that to a co-worker, I'm getting arrested. But, what if my co-worker is my wife? Now what? That's just one funny example, but it's the very small tip of a gargantuan iceberg known for sinking ships that Lisa and I had to learn to navigate. Here's how we did it. Brief history. As a couple, so far Lisa and I have built two incredibly successful companies. If you've never heard of me before, I'm Tom Bilyeu and my wife Lisa and I sold our last company for a billion dollars and have already built another multi-million dollar company since then, which has garnered roughly half a billion views and is rapidly growing. Here's the trick to managing both love and business. Step one, you must choose well. Selection is 80% of the battle in romance. If you can't find someone amazing, masturbate and keep looking because a bad relationship is worse than no relationship at all. That goes for business and love. Unless you want to split your company up in the divorce, don't mess up this step. It will be ruinous. A business will not bring you together any more than kids will. It will expose your flaws. Most of that is going to be intensely personal. You would probably hate being married to me, but my wife swears that she loves it. Now, maybe there's just no accounting for taste or maybe we selected well. I'll let you guys be the judge, but here's the criteria that we've refined over the years whenever people ask this question. Right, number one selection criteria, it's got to be love. It's a bit like pornography, hard to describe, but you'll know it when you see it. Two, you have to be committed to maintaining a thriving sex life. Three, you got to be committed to the relationship as a whole. Four, you both need a growth mindset. Five, you have to share most of your values. You're not going to share them all, but the vast majority you should share. Six, on balance, they need to be your equal. You're going to be good at different things, but they need to be your equal. Seven, on balance, they need to be emotionally stable. We all fluctuate, but on balance. Eight, they need to play a different role than you. Needs to be a complementary role, but they need to play a different role. Nine, they need to legitimately want you to be happy. 10, they need to take full responsibility for their actions and their emotional state. All of those are important, but Lisa and I's secret weapon is that we both have a growth mindset. We focus on the relationship and we are constantly trying to improve. We've always been receptive to critical feedback because our goals are clear. It's incredibly important, and we understand that to achieve our goals, we have to constantly be getting better. Constant, never-ending improvement is required if you want to make meaningful progress in your life. Now, if you or your partner doesn't already have that mentality, stop the video now and go address that. You simply will not succeed working with your spouse if you don't both have a growth mindset. I'm telling you right now, you're not good enough to pull this off yet. Step two, if you want to work well with your significant other, you have to clearly define your roles. This is probably going to be the most contentious thing that we talk about, but Lisa and I realized early on that no relationship will survive two alphas fighting for control. This is a team sport. You each need a clearly defined role, and you need to play it well. Lisa and I have found that this tends to break along traditional gender lines. It doesn't have to, but I think that there are deep biological reasons why this plays out in the averages. I do want to point out one group of nested ideas that I think helps explain this phenomenon. Before I do though, I want to remind everyone that you should find a dynamic that works for you. You should play whatever role in life you want, regardless of your sex. Don't let anyone put you in a box that you don't want to be in, but I think understanding how these play out typically is really, really useful. Number one, we have a big, wrinkly brain. Number two, females carry a disproportionate amount of the weight to deliver that brain. Four, that tendency towards being super selective leads to something called hypergamy. All right, let's take these one at a time. Humans have gotten to where we are not by being faster, having sharper teeth, or stronger muscles. Instead, we've clawed our way to becoming the most dominant apex predator the world has ever seen by creating a gigantic brain full of wrinkles. The problem is that those big brains require a big head. A big head requires a big birth canal. A big birth canal requires a wide, angled pelvis on the part of the female. But, that can only be pushed so far before women can no longer stand upright and run. So, evolution has taken us as far as it could, but then it had to pump the brakes. For us to achieve our full potential though, human babies also are born with soft skulls that require years and years of parental care to fully develop. So, we took the physical part of this on the part of the woman as far as we could, but then we kept pushing the envelope by making that little melon soft so that it could squish a little bit through the birth canal and then continue to expand as kids. And this is why the brain doesn't even stop developing till you're 25 years old. That brings us to the second part, which is that females carry a disproportionate burden when it comes to ensuring that our species survives. As such, from an evolutionary perspective, women became optimized to carry, birth, and nurture infants. That's not all. They're amazing in a gazillion ways, but just as we think about averages, that part of it is so critical that it continues to echo in the way that they are optimized cognitively, physically, emotionally, etc. For the child to be raised to maturity, women a couple of things from the guy. Number one, genetic material. Number two, protection from predators and access to resources that someone who is pregnant, breastfeeding, or going through the strenuous exercise of raising a young child in the wild is obviously a very complex topic that I'm simplifying to make it easier to track, but all of this complexity leads to some outcomes that are useful to understand. One of those outcomes is the fourth thing, and that is something called hypergamy. Hypergamy is roughly defined as women, again on average, tending to date across or up, meaning that women try to find men they think will give them the best shot of raising successful children. This idea is often painted in a really dark and sinister light, and you can basically hear wolves howling in the background when you hear guys talk about this, and so I want to make sure that we look at this in a evolutionary light and see that this is not a bad thing because women are not doing anything sinister by leaving some guys out of the mating pool, which is unfortunately the result that happens through being selective. But let me see if I can say this in a way that really lands closer to what I think is actually happening in a modern context. Women are just trying to find guys that they think are awesome. Guys that are as smart or smarter than them, guys that make as much money or more than they do. Would any of us do anything differently? We all want to find somebody that's at least as cool as we are or even cooler. And what we think of as awesome, of course, is going to vary, but you want somebody that's over or up in the things that matter to you. Now, it's just that for evolutionary reasons men and women consider different things when they think about going over or up, and men and women on average tend to define what is awesome in different ways. Now look, men and women are way more similar than they are different, but understanding the difference becomes incredibly important if you want to understand how to work well with your significant other. But that gets you close enough to understand what comes next, which is the part you need to understand if you're going to be a successful romantic and business partner. Okay, here it goes. Women and men tend to have different strengths and different desires, and those differences tend to funnel them into one of two slots that every business needs. Okay, every business has these two needs. Being a male or female tends to siphon you off into those two. If you've read the book Rocket Fuel, you'll already know what I'm talking about. It breaks down roughly into vision and execution, the rocket and the fuel. Either element on its own is absolutely nothing, but together you can reach the stars. Okay, that was super cheesy, but it's actually true. And when working with your partner, and the reason that all of this is worth it, is because when it goes well, that's exactly how it feels. It feels like, "Whoa, I'm able to do something I would not be able to do on my own, and I'm doing it with somebody that I love. It is an incredible high." But it's important to realize neither role is better than the other. Let me say that again. Neither role is better than the other. Both are critical, but you have to understand them and know which role you fit. What Lisa and I have found, and this is by no way an actual study, but what we've seen in other high-performing couples that work together is that the guys typically provide the vision, and women actually make it happen. It's the classic CEO-COO relationship. One of the most famous business relationships in modern memory is this exact dynamic. You've got Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. Mark a CEO, Sheryl Sandberg the COO. Again, this doesn't need to break along gender lines. Do what works for you and what makes you happy, but the aforementioned framework will hopefully give you a place to start as you think about you and your partner working through this tricky problem. If you think what I'm saying is crazy, I'm going to throw out one stat that may give you pause and give a little credence to this gender bifurcation thing. According to a giant Danish study of 200,000 married couples, men who make less than their wives are significantly more likely to use erectile dysfunction medication than men who out-earn their wives. I'm not saying that it should be that way. I'm just saying that it is that way. Here's my guess as to why. Women, for the reasons discussed, date across and up, hypergamy. Men will do whatever they need to do to get chosen by a woman. They have to because every man alive is descended from a man who figured out a way to convince a woman to give him a shot. So, men have literally evolved to be very good at figuring out how to impress women and deliver on the demands that they're making. Nature has one drive. Let's be real clear. That drive is to keep you alive long enough to get laid and have kids that have kids. Now, how does nature pull that off? Pleasure and pain. It makes pleasurable what keeps you alive and gets you laid, and it makes painful anything that moves you away from that. So, if evolutionarily speaking, women needed men to be smart enough to lead, willing to sacrifice themselves to defend their family, and were able to make good hunting decisions to secure food or other resources for the family, then that's exactly what men will derive pleasure from doing. Said simply, men are going to break themselves in half to lead, sacrifice, and provide, making them ideal rockets. It's exactly what you need from somebody who can go out into the world where there's no one there to supervise them, to tell them what to do, to be put in incredibly dangerous situations, and to be able to make good decisions to get on the other side of that and acquire whatever they need to acquire and bring it back. We often talk about hunting, but that's one of many things. Now, women on the other hand are adept at securing cooperation and realizing their agenda by coordinating the actions of a team, making them the needed fuel to move the rocket. I cannot stress how important that ability is in a company. If you can't do that, you're dead in the water. You might have somebody who's a legendary visionary, they're off making all the right decisions, but if nobody will follow them, and nobody will do what they're talking about, they've got nothing. Let me once again state emphatically that I'm saying all of this within the context of how do you work well with your romantic partners? Successful companies can be built with only women or only men. Not every couple needs to work together, and not every couple will align with the dynamic that I detailed here, and that's wonderful. Do whatever fills your heart, but it is critically important to understand how we've ended up with these averages. That brings us to the next important piece of working with your significant other, step three, understand your partner's needs. Let me tell you a story from my own experience working with my spouse. Hilarious now, but not at all fun in the moment, but it really did crystallize something for me that is critical for anybody that wants to work with their partner to understand. Let me set the stage. We were nude in the shower together. It was super intimate, and even after all of these years, it was still exciting, at least for me. But, despite the setting, something contentious managed to come up. Now, I don't remember exactly what it was, but I'm sure that my wife does, but I do remember the exact exchange that triggered the end of the fun part of the shower. Lisa said to me that she didn't feel supported by me on whatever we were discussing. In response, I said, "Ladies, you are absolutely going to hate this." But I said, and I quote, "I'm not trying to support you right now. I'm trying to figure out what's true." That red line, Lisa, instantly. She was irate. Not mad, irate. I knew she was going to hate the statement, but I honestly didn't fully understand why. I do now, and having the knowledge crystallized has really helped. So, let me really put this succinctly in the hopes that you'll be able to use it as well. Men and women, in general, want their partner to make them feel fundamentally different things. Failing to understand that is going to create a disconnect that creates a massive amount of friction in your relationship. A massive amount of friction. Could be in the romance side, could be in the business side, could be both. There, in the shower, as my excitement turned into painful frustration, I played a mental game with myself. Do this a lot. It's actually really useful. If my wife were a fictional character, what would need to be true about this character to motivate their behavior? Behavior that seems super bizarre to me. The answer in that moment was that one of her fundamental drivers would have to be the need for blind support from her husband. Not reasoned support, blind support. And as soon as I had that realization, like a puzzle piece clicking into place, I updated my mental model and realized that's exactly what she needed. Here's why I think that mental model update was really useful and how it can stand for what men and women want their partner to make them feel. For a woman to thrive in a relationship, her man needs to make her feel four things. Loved, supported, beautiful, and safe. Men need to feel loved, appreciated, and powerful. Supported and appreciated are very different things, and that was the crux of the problem that we were having in the shower, and I think sits at the intersection of why men and women often collide. Going back to the evolutionary framing here, if a woman has made herself vulnerable in order to optimize for having successful children, she needs to be able to say what she needs to be supported in that endeavor and actually get it. To effectively work through others, feeling like you're supported by those around you becomes an incredibly important marker of safety. Now, men on the other hand have been optimized for something completely different. They've been optimized for making themselves powerful enough to go out and slay monsters on your behalf. Remember, they're just trying to impress you enough to get a chance at being in the mating pool. Now, according to something called the disposable male hypothesis, evolution has optimized men to be willing to lay down their lives to protect and provide for their family and community. Now, if you misread the situation, a sexy shower turns into a not at all sexy argument. And when you work together, misalignment in one area becomes destructive in both arenas. And this is why most people that try to work with their significant other end in disaster. And that brings us to step four of working well with your significant other. Create rules of engagement around how to deal with the collision of two modes of being, romance and business. Now, romance and business are not like oil and water where they don't mix. They're like Mentos and Coca-Cola where they mix together explosively. Most people that try to work together are going to end up like someone who mixes Mentos and Coke. It seems fun until [ __ ] ends up going everywhere. Now, when you're working with your partner, you have two social contracts to deal with instead of just one. Being a good romantic partner is hard enough. Being a good business partner is hard enough. Being a romantic partner that knows how to seamlessly move back and forth from business partner to lover is brutally difficult. It's only possible if you have rules for doing so. Rule number one, define your roles clearly. This is what we've been talking about. What do you want and expect from each other? Be hyper specific. Now, this is going to get really uncomfortable because it's going to force you to face things like gender roles, what role you guys play in the romance and in the business. Let me give you an example. Here's what I said to Lisa when we founded Impact Theory. I'm vision, you're execution. We bring equal value to the table but in different ways. If ever we understand each other but still disagree, we will go with my decision every single time. If you agree that that's the right dynamic, let's go into business together. If you don't or it feels uncomfortable in any way, shape or form, it isn't the life you want to live, fair enough. Take half of the money that we've set aside for building a company and I'll take the other half and we'll build separate things. I'm completely fine with that. I want you to be happy and do your thing. But if we're going to do it together, that's how it's going to be. It was clear to me without language that explicit, we would end up colliding constantly. Rule of engagement number two, respect the tension between your points of view. Let me be abundantly clear. My wife is a wickedly smart, bold, confident, driven woman. She is never going to slow down so that I can lead. But she's also not as good at business decision-making as I am. Now, was that just hypergamy playing out and she went and found somebody that she was like, "Cool, you can go do that part and I'm going to do this part?" I'm sure it was all subconscious, but nonetheless, that's where we ended up. And if you think that I'm saying this out of arrogance or because she's not here to cry foul, you can watch the episode that we filmed of Women of Impact where we discuss this live on camera together and you can see exactly how we relate to each other over this. And the reality is, we're just being honest about what each of us is good at and we respect the tension between our modes of thinking. Decision-making is only one of the skills needed. Also, we're all deeply flawed. You need to hunger for people that will point out where you've gone wrong. So, respect the tension. This even if you're the one that's the final decision-maker. This is not about bowling over the other person and constantly getting them to do what you say. This is about working with someone who you consider your equal, who has different skills than you, who sees things that you might be blind to. That's an incredibly important part of this. This is why, when it works well, you come together and feel like, "Oh my god, I have the chills right now." That I'm building something I could not build on my own. That is exactly how I feel working with Lisa. By myself, I would not be able to do what I'm able to do with her. And so, both of us, even though we have these clearly defined roles, we respect the tension between us. The whole point between that CEO COO dynamic is that they see things in a different way than you. You share values, you share goals, but you see things in a different way. And so, by getting the tension between those two viewpoints, you're able to find that path through to actual success. Now, here's an analogy that Lisa and I use all the time for this idea. Uh for a business to work, you need both a kite and a string to keep the kite in the air. It is the dynamic tension between the two of those things that's going to make things work. If you just have a kite, it flies off into nowhere, wherever the wind takes it, and eventually crashes into something. And if you just have a string, it just lays on the ground. But, when you have the two in dynamic tension, it stays in the air. So, it's super important that you don't fall prey to thinking that one role in the relationship is better or more important than the other, which I think is the root of a lot of tension between men and women today. Somehow, it's gotten in culture that guys have the cool role, and women have the lame role. It's not that at all. They're both incredibly important, and I think the only way forward is for us to find that dynamic tension. Now, if you understand that both are equally important, that brings us to rule number three. Partner only with your equal. Don't look for a subordinate. Don't look for a boss. You're looking for someone who sees things slightly differently than you, but on balance, when all of your talents and intelligences are all put together, that you guys are equal. Now, while you guys are going to be doing different things, and you're going to be good at different things, no matter what your business partnership is like, no matter if one of you is literally the boss and the other sees themselves more as an employee, in your emotional relationship, you must be equals. That may be the most important thing that I've said so far. For love to last and be joyful, it needs to be the coming together of two equals. And you need to make your partner feel that in their bones. I'll tell you a story on that. When Lisa and I founded Impact Theory, a lawyer told us, "Hey, one of you needs to own 49% of this thing and the other needs to own 51%. That way, should you guys ever get into a divorce, that way it's clear who controls the business." What I said to them was, "Nope, make the ultimate divorce nightmare. I want a 50/50 relationship. I want Lisa to see on paper that we are equals, that we bring an equal amount to this endeavor. Even though we do different things, ultimately, it's equal. And that it's up to the two of us to be able to navigate the emotions and the business well. On that is rule number four. You need to act differently in your romantic partnership than you do in your business partnership. And that is so important. I once came home from a particularly contentious day at work. Lisa and I had really collided, and I had to pull the it's my decision card in front of other people. It was brutal. And I'm sure that I could have handled it better, but Lisa handled it like a pro. And as is typical for us, she got off work before I did. So, when I came home, she was already there. I walk in the door, and I'm expecting a fight, but she couldn't have been happier to see me. And I sheepishly asked, "How was your day?" And without missing a beat, she said, "My boss was an [ __ ] but I'm so excited to see my husband." She threw her arms around me and gave me a big hug. And I'm actually stopping myself from being emotional right now, because in that moment, I realized that my wife was a ninja, and that she understood how to navigate this world incredibly well. That she understood that there was a wild difference between being my business partner and being my wife. Now, I proceeded to fall all over myself finding ways to show her that in the grand summation of our relationship, despite the fact that I played that card, so that I knew that we were equals. And that while I might have in that moment been the decision-maker in that dynamic, if I'm honest, I was the boss, not now at Impact Theory, but I was at that time. But even if in that scenario, it's true, I'm not the boss in our relationship, even if both of us see me as the leader. An important side note about leading, true leadership really is knowing that sometimes you lead and sometimes you follow. You're never going to be good at everything. But if you and your teammates are working together to elevate each other, odds are you're going to end up in the right place, especially if you follow rule number five, lead with love. Lead with love. Fill your heart with love. Want your partner to win in all aspects of their life, and help them actually do that. Life is hard. Love is beautiful. Nurture your love with everything you've got. It will get you through the darkest of times. Success will come and go, but love done well really can last a lifetime. And it will certainly fill you up in ways that nothing else can. Not all the success in the world, not all the money in the world. As cheesy as it might be, love really is the best thing that life has on offer. Rule number six, over communicate. You need to over communicate with your partner whether or not you work together. You need a shared language, which is harder than it sounds. You have to define terms and all kinds of crazy stuff. A shared narrative, you need to know, how do we actually categorize my contribution, your contribution, how do we talk about it to each other, to other people? And a shared vision. What is all of this building towards? You guys need to know that. you need to talk about it. And then ultimately, you need to follow all of these rules of engagement so that you can deal with a thousand different scenarios that are rushing towards you that, if you're not careful, will turn you into Mentos and Coke. But if you are careful, turns you into a rocket well fueled. One important point about communication. You guys are going to be talking endlessly. So, gentlemen, if the constant navigation of ideas and emotions isn't your bag, do not go into the minefield of working with your significant other. You will hate it. But if you're willing to do all of that communication, I've found that other than having children, which is almost certainly the pinnacle, there's nothing more profound than building something meaningful together with your partner. Building with Lisa has been the greatest joy of my life. That's why I think that as more and more people decide not to have children, that this topic has become the number one requested topic for Lisa and I to cover. Now, I really hope that hearing about how Lisa and I have navigated this insanely tricky terrain is helpful to all of you. I hope that you guys take this merely as a starting point and that you find what works best for you. I hope you understand the averages, but don't feel that you need to conform to them. I hope that you find what works for you and live a life that you love. If you like this video, I think you're going to love this next video that we did about love and relationships. Make sure you check it out.