Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to another episode of A Brit and a Yank. Talk business. I'm the Brit. I'm Tom. And who have we got on the other end? Sat on his deck chair and the Yank.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: I'm Stuart, drinking out of the Trump mug here on the side. So it's happening. Welcome to another episode of A Brit and a Yank. Today we have something fun, actually to talk about. So we got our first question. Tom, you sent me this a couple of days ago or yesterday, or maybe it was this morning. They're all running together, but you sent me this a little while back. We got our first question in and people were asking about the dreaded work life balance. You remember that? Honestly, I get this question all the time and I'm sure that you do too. Like people. People are often asking, what do I do about the work life balance?
I think let's, let's jump right into it, man.
Tom, what do you, what. How do you balance your work life and your, and, you know, your personal, your me time.
[00:00:59] Speaker A: I want to. I'm going to jump in. And the first caveat here is that work life balance is garbage. But let's just, let's just start with that. You know, God. God made us to work. I was having this conversation with someone the other day. We were chatting about kind of. Well, we were chatting about the content of what we discussed, really. So Christians in business and the fact that, you know, Adam worked in the garden before the fall.
So what did the fall do? It just made work sticky, difficult. Okay, so thorns and thistles.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: There was no work life balance pre fall.
Therefore, work life balance is garbage. And I think it's particularly different, difficult in kind of the culture in the UK where that kind of escapism and self dependence and I live for the weekend and how far can I travel in the kind of time that I'm not in the office is very much there and to the point where I was having a conversation with a friend the other day who's the.
[00:01:57] Speaker B: You might actually listen to this.
[00:01:59] Speaker A: The CEO of a tech company or the coo. Shall I'll correct myself. And we were kind of talking about the content of contracts and how you balance with employees and whether kind of flexi time is a good thing. And we effectively came to the conclusion that, no, it's a terrible thing in that not only is the employee watching the clock because you're exchanging this limited number of hours for pay, the boss is also watching the clock because they know that the employee is watching the clock.
[00:02:28] Speaker B: Tom, define flexi Time for our American audience, because we don't know what that is.
[00:02:32] Speaker A: Okay? So I'm going to introduce you to some good, solid socialism here. You'll love this. So typically in the uk, and you know, you might think I'm joking, but I'm not most people, and I'm talking about professionals.
So engineers would fall into that category, work 37 and a half hours a week, and that is written into their contract.
We also get legally a minimum of 28 days holiday a year.
[00:02:57] Speaker B: What?
[00:02:59] Speaker A: So that's a legal minimum.
[00:03:01] Speaker B: You get a month of vacation a year.
[00:03:04] Speaker A: No, no, no, no, no.
[00:03:05] Speaker B: That's.
[00:03:05] Speaker A: That's the minimum, Stuart.
[00:03:09] Speaker B: Okay, okay, okay.
[00:03:11] Speaker A: And very few people have the minimum. Okay. So like 35 days isn't uncommon. You could have more than that.
[00:03:19] Speaker B: I just can't believe that. That's just wild to me.
[00:03:22] Speaker A: So flexi time would effectively be this kind of negotiation that I work 37 and a half hours. If I work a longer day, Monday to Thursday, can I take every other Friday off?
Something a bit like that.
[00:03:35] Speaker B: Okay, okay, okay, I understand.
[00:03:38] Speaker A: And yeah, it's effectively detrimental. And it just feeds this kind of work life balance, conversation and problem.
[00:03:44] Speaker B: So, work life balance.
I think there's some presuppositions under this, right? You're kind of. You're kind of dealing with them out of the gate already. First off, presupposition number one is that work is bad, but you have to do it, right.
[00:03:59] Speaker A: Yep, yep.
[00:04:01] Speaker B: And I would.
[00:04:01] Speaker A: It's a means to an end.
[00:04:02] Speaker B: Yeah, I would say, and I think the Bible says that work is good. You're given work to do, go do it. Go enjoy your work. Work, in fact, gives you purpose. I think that we believe things like, you know, if I have more leisure time, if I have more me time, if I get to decide what I want to do every day, then I'll be happier.
And that's just not true experientially or factually. Go and spend your days in leisure and let me know how you feel. At the end of the day, you're not going to feel better. You're going to be itching for something to do.
[00:04:34] Speaker A: I mean, I can't remember where it might have been on Twitter or just a passing comment about kind of the mental health crisis that exists and the irony there that the world believes, or the pagans believe that the solution to that is working less and introduce drugs and some sort of psychology and some weird Lego play which is just a joke. And.
But the answer really is working. You know, it's delivering a sense of purpose. It's doing something that is tangible and contributing to family, society, et cetera. But the irony that, that the world, the pagans, think that that is actually the problem and not the solution.
It just smells of socialism.
[00:05:12] Speaker B: Well, so we're saying let's work less. So we feel better.
We work less than anyone ever has before us.
Go talk to your grandparents, if they're still alive, and let them tell you stories about their work days.
Go talk to your parents and talk and understand what their work days look like. And we're over here complaining because we might, we might actually make it to 40 hours. What a weird world to live in. It's, we're, it's. Of course we're sad. It's because we've lost our purpose. But that also, I think that brings up more to this conversation too. So somebody who's asking about work, life, balance, I would caution them to, to be careful about the pills that you're swallowing. Be careful about the presuppositions that you're swallowing One, like we're talking about. Work is a good thing. And it actually, it actually gives your life purpose and mission and meaning. But it only does that if the work that you're doing is oriented towards the mission, the bigger mission right now. For, for us, for Christians, it's very easy for us to point to what the bigger mission is. It's to advance the Kingdom of Christ on Earth. That's our bigger mission. And so everything that we do orients to that particular task. We, we raise our children to the glory of God because we're going to send them out to carry farther what we've started. We are laboring. We go out to earn a paycheck to feed those kids in order to send them out in those particular things to grow our resources, we start businesses so that we can hire people and serve others well and treat them Christianly. I talked to Andrew Krapusetz, who owns Red Balloon here in the States a couple of days ago.
Tom, you were a part of that. And he made the comment that work or business, excuse me, business is blessing people at scale. In other words, you're creating something that other people want and then you're providing it for them at what they would consider a fair rate.
Amen.
That's a good thing to do.
But if what you view work as solely this thing that you have to go and do in order to get the money that you need in order to live, what an empty existence, that's just sad, you know? No Wonder we're in a mental health crisis.
[00:07:32] Speaker A: Well, entirely like if work is merely a means to an end, you're going to try and do work as little as possible. You're not going to find any satisfaction in it because you're only going to find satisfaction in everything that isn't that. Whereas if you, as you've alluded to, if you swap that to being our central purpose and that being kind of multifaceted, then just, I certainly feel this, and I think, you know, we've touched on it previously in conversations. It's kind of flipped in that if work becomes a purpose, then the drivers and the motivation for that just explode and suddenly work's really exciting and you're building all these things and the level of kind of interest and engage and the rest of it just skyrockets. But I think I want to.
So what I want to learn from you within this conversation. And I watched. Is it Joel Salatin or I started watching his documentary the other day. And I think Americans, you know, you laugh at me for saying 37 and a half hours. So I think that's kind of, it's telling. We as Brits can certainly learn from America. Like, how do we engage with work? How do we structure or more how do we structure our day? You know, how.
Cause like the idea of like a 50 hour work week, 60 hour work week, you know, I think there's an awful lot of Americans or there are definitely a lot of Americans that work more than I do. People in the UK here will be looking at me and going, tom, you work a silly number of hours. And I'll be looking at you lot and being like, you work a silly number of hours.
I'd love to understand kind of what that looks like just to be like, you know, how on earth do you squeeze that in? Because I think that's the question that people listening to us right now are going to be asking, Tom, how do you, how do you work a 50 hour week? And I can be like, well, it's actually quite easy. You do all these things. But I look at you lot and you guys are working, I don't know, a 70 hour week. And I'm like, I can't get my head around how I would do that. So I want to learn from you.
[00:09:18] Speaker B: Yeah, well, okay, well, so I would say the first thing that you have to do for the course now, I'm making Christian assumptions in this conversation. Like, I'm coming to this with a Christian worldview. The first thing, the big hurdle that everybody has to get over is work six days rest. One that's like for some people, that's just panic to them now in the States it's a little bit easier because we have the workaholic problem here where people never stop working and they're perpetually finding a reason to keep going and keep grinding. And God says no to that. God says, you're gonna work six days, but you're going to stop every week on the Lord's day and you're gonna rest. And your calendar is centered around me and my laws, not what you think you have to do in order to reach your. And that was one of the things, and we talked about this in previous episodes, that was one of the things that we drew a hard line on for our business whenever we started. Now, we haven't done it perfectly, we've screwed it up a couple of times, you know, but we're working, we're trying to do it the best we possibly can. And I think the Lord has blessed that. You know, we let our clients know. We're like, hey, we're not available on Sundays unless there's a crisis. If there's an emergency, then we're available. But generally speaking, we're not. And I think it's gone, gone very well for us. So if you can, if you can do that, if you can say, okay, work six days, got it, then I can, I can move from there and say, now a 60 hour workweek is normal.
[00:10:45] Speaker A: The question that someone's going to ask is going to be, or certainly from the UK is going to be, what do I do with my Saturday? Like my, my kids aren't in school or being educated because they only do that Monday to Friday. Maybe that's a different conversation. But they only do that Monday to Friday. So there's this day when, I don't know, potentially a lot of other people aren't working so much. I could go hang out with the family from church. I could go and fly a kite with my children.
What one of those good things to do? And I think let's not unpack all of that, but are they good things to do and kind of what do you, what do you do with your Saturday? And I think the question here is, or a question here is when is the time that you, what does it look like to spend time with your kids? I think is one question. I think it'd be an interesting one. And then the other is, do you go and fly kites with them and let them ride their bike around the playground or around your house?
[00:11:38] Speaker B: Yeah, so, okay, I understand the context a little bit more now. And so I think probably it would be beneficial to everyone for me to define work very specifically. Okay.
Because I think some people are listening to this and assuming that what Stuart just said is go to your day job and work a 60 hour week at your day job. And that's not actually what I'm saying at all because I think that that will put you in a position where you're going to neglect your family and your responsibilities there.
But work, I think should be defined as whatever it is that you do in order to fulfill the mission that God has given us. Work is what you do to fulfill the mission that God has given us. All right?
Now that very specifically requires us to raise and disciple our children effectively, which means time. That translates to time. And to follow up on the question of what do I do? How do I do that? If I'm trying to be faithful inside of work itself and if I'm trying to be faithful in growing a business or being faithful to my employer, how do I make those things happen?
I think maybe just examples would be the most helpful. So what I like to do particularly for my week is I like early starts.
So I'll wake up 5, 5:30 in the morning and I get up, do my Bible reading devotions, make a cup of coffee, and then I plop down in my chair and I start doing my intellectual work.
And I'm doing that.
[00:13:02] Speaker A: What time is that? Because I think one of the things that I want to know is tangibly, what does Stuart's day look like?
[00:13:08] Speaker B: Yeah, you said you get up at half five?
Yeah, five, 5:30 in the morning, then around.
I probably finish my bible reading around 6 o' clock in the morning. And so from about 6 to 8, I'm dialed in to what I would call like intellectual work, thought work. I'm reading, I'm preparing sermons for Sunday, thinking about systems inside of the business on occasion, although I don't do that too much during that window of time. And then around 8 o' clock we do, we have in our house we do this tradition of family breakfast, which is, you know, super fun. So all the kids, our kids are home for the summer. We homeschooled last year. Everybody was around and so we started this thing where our family gets up around 8:00'. Clock. Well, they're up before that point. Our we have a 7:30 wake up time in our house. Just standard for Everybody. But around 8 o' clock we'll go and we'll gather in the Kitchen it's provided nothing crazy is happening in our lives and, or schedules. And we have breakfast together. We'll make, I believe the, I believe the English term is a, is a whole fry. That'll be, you know, I get as close as I can to that. I can't quite pull it off because it's way too much. But we do eggs, we'll do toast, we'll do fun things like that for the kids. Occasionally we do grilled tomato. And it's, it's fun and enjoyable and we sit down together and we start our day. That's kind of a kickoff point. Then after that's done, I pack up and I'll head into the office sometime around 9 o'. Clock. So my staff gets into the office around 9, I get there around 9:30, typically most days.
And then I'm there interacting with them. I also very often bring my kids with me to work. So I take my, I'll pick one or two of my kids and I'll take them into the office.
My older kids will work on school stuff while they're there reading different projects. My younger kids are just, you know, they're there, they're not, they're not really able to be self regulated yet. They're 8 and 6, you know, but I still bring them with me. Sometimes I bring them with me for half a day, sometimes I bring them with me for the whole day. I think it's helpful. And our office, you know, we have a culture of kids being around, so that's normal. Nobody's surprised by that. And they're like, oh look, Stuart brought one of his kids today. I'm like, yep, sure did.
And then typically, sometimes I'll come home for lunch, but I don't always do that. And I'll be at the office until around 5 o'. Clock. And then whenever I get home at 5, we start our family dinner traditions, you know, whatever that may look like. And we're working on cooking, we're hanging out together. Maybe there's some chores that I gotta do outside of the house. Maybe the kids got chores that they have to wrap up too before the day wraps up. And so we work on those things together. My daughter raises chickens. My son has the responsibility of taking care of the dog. He and I were feeding the dog yesterday. My oldest wanted me to take her to go buy flowers yesterday before dinner. And so like, sure, why not? So we packed up and drove out and got flowers and we got home and we had dinner and then we'll typically we'll Sit down. And in the evenings we'll have some kind of like a. We'll watch a film or, you know, some kind of thing. I think last night it was. We were watching Fixer Uppers. That's what it was. We were watching an episode of, Of Chip and Joanna Gaines Flipping a house. Which is fun, you know, because my kids are thinking about.
And I am thinking about it too, honestly, real estate, you know, and they're kind of getting that culture brought into them and thinking about beautifying and making things better. So we enjoy that. And then after that, it's typically around 9 or 10 o', clock, 8:30, somewhere around there. And we tell our younger children, okay, it's time to go to bed. And we get them ready for bed. We'll do evening prayers.
We put them off to bed around that time. And then I go. We have a home gym.
I'll step into my gym at around 9 or 10 o' clock at night and I'll do my evening workouts. And then I go to bed and I sleep hard and then I wake up and I start the next thing again, you know. And that's typically my weekday routine. Now Saturdays look different. Saturdays I'm up. Saturday is my day to sleep in. Sleep in. So typically I'll wake up around 6:30 or 7 and then I'll get up and I'll do the same thing. I'll start my intellectual work. We don't make the kids wake up early on Saturdays, we let them sleep in two.
I'll sit in my chair and do my intellectual work until around, you know, 8:30, 9:00', clock, something like that.
Typically if I have counseling appointments and it's somebody who can't make it during working hours, during the work week, I'll meet them on a Saturday. So I'll duck over to my office.
And typically my employees, a handful of them are in the office working on different things because they've got deadlines to meet or different projects to do. But everybody understands that Saturday is not a requirement, it's just an option.
And if they want to go in and do some overtime work, they're more than welcome to. And so I'm often there and I'll see a handful of my staff there working on different projects and finishing up different things.
And then I'll take my meetings and maybe there's some things that I need to wrap up as well. And then I'll go back home. And typically my time in the office on a Saturday, if I go in at all, it's like two hours. It's not very long. And then I'm back home, and we're getting ready for. We're cleaning the house, cleaning the outside, getting everything ready for the big celebration that night. Because every Saturday we throw our Sabbath dinners. And this is. This is like, we haven't done it for the last couple weeks because we've had some health things going on in our family. But that's like this huge family celebration. My family comes in, my parents and one of my brothers, my wife's family comes in. We invite some guests from church over, and we just prepare for the Lord's Day. And it's awesome. We do it every week, you know, and everybody gets to fellowship, and my family gets to be a part of it, and my wife's family gets to be a part of it. And the whole point, we tell everybody, you know, hey, we're preparing for the Lord's Day right now. We're starting it right now. And we're celebrating. We have, you know, good wine and good food that my wife has worked on all day.
Sometimes it's pizza because the week was crazy. You know, that's just normal. But most of the time, it's this big fancy meal that's set out. And it's good, man. It's just good. And so then we get to sit down and celebrate the Lord's Day together. And we rest super hard on Sundays. We don't do anything unless we have to. We'll go swim in our pool, and then we go to bed at the end of the day and we start over on Monday. It's a great routine, you know, and honestly, like, I find this far more. More fulfilling than the laziness that I was dealing with in my life, you know, 20 years ago, where I just wanted to sit down and only worked whenever I had to work and then checked out and played video games or whatever the heck it was for the rest of my day. Like, that was empty, man. That was super empty. But to be able to build and have a full week of rich, good things to do that are fruitful and to see the fruit as it grows in my children and in the work that we're doing is incredibly rewarding. Incredibly rewarding.
[00:19:57] Speaker A: I think one of. One of the things that's kind of come to mind in that, again, said in one of our other episodes about.
You made the point that men build relationships when they work hard together. It's not when they're playing video games.
I think we can map that onto the child family life as well, so the relationships are being built when you invite your daughter to go to work with you.
The relationships are being built when your children are there.
They're observing you doing jobs or chores, and you're encouraging them to do them. Also, I think it's ironic that people have this idea of quality time and what they're saying when they're saying quality time is the sitting watching TV while sat next to each other or playing video games together, or the things that actually aren't quality and the things that actually don't build relationships.
It's within those. Those stressed moments. And like, you know, I. I think about it with my wife and, and any kind of marriage, like whenever there's. There's a difficult moment and there's a disagreement, the relationship is actually better on the other side of the disagreement.
[00:21:04] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:21:05] Speaker A: Like, it's built, it's made more robust. You know, you're sanctified through those things.
So it's. In fact, it's the hard moments. I can't remember who I was listening to, but effectively those moments where kind of traction exists.
It's those rough items where kind of sin is being taken away and we're actually being shaped in our character. And that's what we're ultimately talking about. We're talking about our own character and we're talking about the character of our children or those that we're responsible for.
And that happens through kind of that sticky hard work, not the video games and kite flight.
[00:21:37] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I have an immediate illustration of that. So my father just had an emergency triple bypass two weeks ago. Side note, take care of your hearts, everybody, because you don't want to go through this, I'll tell you. But it required us as a family to suddenly do a lot more and have a lot longer days because it meant that somebody had to be. My mother is not in the best of health. Somebody had to be with her during the days to make sure that she was taken care of. So my wife went over there for several days. My dad's in the hospital in ICU recovering, and he needs an advocate with him in the hospital.
And so I'm with him in ICU for several days. And my kids are old enough to be mostly independent by this point. So my oldest child's able to watch the children. We had some. I think they stayed with one of their grandparents for a couple of days on my mother's side.
And it was hard work nonstop for about seven days as we're just trying to keep all the bases covered and make sure that my father is recovering and make sure that my mother is cared for and make sure that the children are okay.
And you know what was amazing is that that was such a galvanizing moment for our entire family.
We recognized that there was a. There was work that needed to be done, there was a mission that needed to be fulfilled right there in front of us. And everybody put their heads down, locked in, and did it.
And it was glorious. On the other side of that, my kids. I remember walking in my backyard and just like, weeping with my wife with joy because I was like, look how our family is doing this right now. Like. Like they're thriving. Everybody's got their heads down and are happy to do this incredibly hard thing in front of them because they get it. They get the mission. They understand that our job is to take care of our people.
And so we're going to lay down everything we gotta do in order to do it. It was awesome. And that never would have happened without an incredibly difficult trial to walk through then. It was good and it was glorious. I'm grateful for that. And I've seen that over and over again in my life. Like, we have a tradition in our family, too. Whenever we have very hard things or public accusations come against us that we have a fancy dinner that night, it's great, and we toast that the Lord would give us such a trial because he's going to do good things with it. And we've seen specific growth directly connected to the difficult things that we walk through.
And I would say by not trying to shelter our children from them, you know, by letting them see that this is hard, by letting them walk through the trial with us and letting them experience it and work harder, they've been made better for it. And it's been good. It's been incredibly good.
[00:24:31] Speaker A: I think that, you know, talking about presuppositions, I think that is the point though, isn't it? Like, work is a blessing and we need to flip this on its head and try and move away from the. Because I think the question was about how do you juggle.
[00:24:45] Speaker B: What was it?
[00:24:46] Speaker A: Yeah, kind of, how do you meet the balance between family time and work time?
And effectively, I would pose that both of those things. I'm kind of reading into the question. Both of them are being read wrong, and they need to be brought under the same umbrella that, like, work time encompasses family time. And I think family time is probably ill defined, poorly defined, and that family time actually encompasses work time also. So the first issue is just separating them.
And then as we said at kind of the beginning, what is our primary function? Well, it's work. And you're defining work, kind of covering all of those things, not just your day job.
[00:25:27] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:25:28] Speaker A: And that they're. And when you understand that, you know, we are made for work in the first place, and therefore work is in fact a blessing to us, that blessing is going to leak out and it's going to. It's going to encompass our family, it's going to encompass our kids.
So.
[00:25:41] Speaker B: And nobody asked that question before the Industrial Revolution.
Right. Like this category of work and family separation didn't exist before then because daddy was a cobbler and little Susie swept the floors and his son was learning the trade and mama worked the till.
Like that was, that was just how it worked. The whole family was in the business. Her dad was a baker and the same thing played out. Her dad was a, you know, pick your thing. And if you were a farmer, especially in the States, you were actually incentivized to have lots of children because that meant you had more help, like to do the work, to do the work.
[00:26:20] Speaker A: In the field with your pension as well.
[00:26:23] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. Because they were the ones who were going to take care of you when you got sick because there was no retirement. Now in our post industrial revolution, post enlightenment, radical, individualistic society, we have all these weird categories that no one had before. And so there's almost this need to remember how humanity actually works. Covenantally family oriented, handing down your. Not just your values, but who you are to these children so that they can be better versions of you whenever they grow up, to be more fruitful than you whenever they grow up.
And to do that hard and heavy lift.
That's what we're actually meant for and not this weird mindset of whenever I die, the last check I write is going to bounce. All my money's for me. Sorry, kids. Figure it out for yourselves. What a crap life. That's just garbage, man. Train your kids to live Christianly and to work hard because they're a part of the same mission that you're on. They're a part of it with you. It's good and it's helpful. Ugh, there's so many false dichotomies.
[00:27:35] Speaker A: I think a helpful example here is you sat on what I assume is your deck of your kind of garage or garage, and your daughter's sat next to you and like, you know, you're working right now. We're having this conversation. You know, we've outlined kind of why we're doing this, but your daughter is fully exposed to kind of what we're doing right now.
Like she's, she's learning work from you, even though she's, I'm guessing, kind of focusing on some sort of home study, whatever it might be. But like, it's that we can be, we can be fully focused on the thing that we need to be focused on, on the piece of work that's in front of us. And like, without compromising on that, because we don't, I don't think we need to, you know, we can be accommodating, but without compromising, we can expose our children to that. And we can be spending what I think we should be divining as quality time, genuine quality time with them in the room as we do this thing. And in that, you know, your child is one, learning from you, but two, getting to know you better. They now know your character.
Yes, they can learn from that. And same vice versa. You know, they'll start asking you questions and in your response to that's a great question, have you thought about this? You're building something and you're actually learning about them as they're observing you. So, yes.
Yeah, I feel I'm just, I'm quite enjoying just kind of unpacking this and where this has gone, really, because we're kind of just debunking the whole, I think family work separation rather than necessarily work life balance.
[00:29:01] Speaker B: Yes, that's a great point. That's a great point. Or even just me time, work balance, you know, because that's the other. If folks don't necessarily have families, they might be thinking about it that way. How do I get my. Especially in the mental health nonsense crisis thing that we're in today, people are saying, but what about my mental health? One of my clients literally just dealt with one of these issues with one of his employees. He was trying to figure out how to help them navigate the, the exact same situation, the work life balance. And he was presenting them compensation options and, you know, work hours and all that stuff. And the employee's retort was, but what about my mental health? And it was just like, oh, no.
[00:29:40] Speaker A: I think one of the underlying things here that we haven't touched on that probably needs just, I don't know, exposing is that I think I can speak for you also. But like, we're aware that our time is not our own.
So our time is, and I think this is a conversation for a different day a little bit, but quite, quite an interesting one. So what do we all have everyone on Earth owns one thing, and that is time. God has given every single one of us 24 hours in a day. Now, this is the only asset we can. You know, we can decide what to do with it. We can exchange it for other things, because effectively, that's what work is. But we're all blessed with exactly the same thing. Now, we've got to recognize that that is a gift.
It's a gift from God, and it doesn't belong to ourselves. So how do we therefore take that? Thinking about kind of the parable of the talents, how do we take what we've given and put a return on it? Well, we're not lazy.
We actually.
I don't have me time.
You know, there might be time where I'm sat. There might be time where I'm sat on a sofa or a chair on my own. But, like, what am I going to be doing, though, with that? I'm going to be. I'm going to be reading. And what's that reading going to be? It's going to be something intentional, and it's going to be something that feeds me.
And it could be kind of, I don't know, a historic fiction. But it'll be a historic fiction that's, like, written by a Christian or about a particular time in history that I want to know more about so I can engage my kids about it. Or it'll be something like that.
And even, like, you know, we touched on. We don't own a tv. We'll kind of watch stuff on a laptop is what we'll occasionally do. And like, yeah, we're watching the Joel Salatin documentary, but, like, I want to learn about kind of his approach to farming through a biblical lens, and we want to feed that. So everything needs to be intentional, or everything should be intentional. Yeah, we can relax and we can enjoy things, but our time is not our own.
[00:31:35] Speaker B: Amen. Yeah, I think.
I think that might actually be a great point to talk about next time is the whole idea of what does it mean to generate a return.
What does it mean to grow your talents. Right. And is that a biblical obligation? I would say yes. I would say it definitely is. But we don't think that way anymore. We don't think about, God's given me this, therefore I should make more with it.
Instead, we think I'm going to spend everything I have before I die. That's such a strange selfishness, you know? And I would say, to England's credit, my friend, I think that the original deployment of the gentry was to that end, the nobles understood that they had a responsibility to their people, to their, to their land. They were landlord and they wanted to be a good lord and they wanted to care for them and make sure that the farmers on their property had the best things that they could, and they could make sure that they were doing what they ought to do in order to care for these people properly. Now, did everybody do it? Great. No. Were some people wicked? Yes, obviously that's true. But the general premise was I, as a person who has been blessed with much, will be a blessing to others and I will make sure that this blessing continues to grow.
That's the general premise. That's a Christian premise, you know, And.
[00:33:03] Speaker A: I think one of our issues is we've removed that as an option for a premise for why or, or how people make decisions. So when we're disingenuous on, when we reflect on history and we just decide that everybody was mean to everybody, because that's the only thing, that was the only lens that we can understand this through, that they must be seeking out their own ends. And, and I was going to call it leisure, but it's not leisure, just self indulgence.
[00:33:27] Speaker B: Yeah, well, it's. If they have money, therefore they must be wicked. They must have gotten it through a wicked way. They had to have. It couldn't be the blessings of God. It could only be someone who is evil and has taken advantage of someone else. There has to be proletariat. That's all Marx's socialist presuppositions.
[00:33:45] Speaker A: Evil. You can profit on evil. Can't you see?
[00:33:47] Speaker B: Profitable. Yeah, this is, this is the thing, man. I think, yeah, I think that's. I think that's a great conversation topic for, For a future episode. We can get into that a little bit more. But to sum up where we are today, Right, Well, I, I want to.
[00:34:02] Speaker A: I want to outline my day before we kind of close.
[00:34:05] Speaker B: Hit it, Hit it.
[00:34:07] Speaker A: I, I don't think it's that different. It is a little bit different to yours, but just as another reference point for people. Really.
[00:34:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:34:14] Speaker A: So hit it. I mean, the main difference here is I get more sleep than you do. I think particularly when I'll message you and you'll reply at what is 3am in America? And I'm like, what with you?
[00:34:24] Speaker B: So my tip there is, sometimes I can't sleep, man. Sometimes I'm just up.
[00:34:29] Speaker A: Leave your phone downstairs. Anyway, so my day. So I get up at kind of quarter to six and then I spend an hour in the morning reading really. So half of that I'll be reading the Bible and then the other half will be reading, I don't know, something, something related to scripture. I will then go and prepare breakfast for my family. So I won't finish cooking it and that's a blessing to my wife as she facilitates the likes of homeschooling, etc. And then I'll go upstairs. So this is kind of about 7 o' clock and I'll be upstairs for half an hour, 45 minutes and then everybody's down at the kitchen table. We all have breakfast together, so we have scrambled eggs every morning. And then at the weekend we might involve fried tomatoes, mushrooms, sausages and bacon. And in the egg is loads of butter, loads of salt and loads of cream.
[00:35:21] Speaker B: Not, this is not a heart healthy egg option.
[00:35:24] Speaker A: Well, there's, there's an argument there, but anyway, and then, and I'll disappear back upstairs and I'll work till kind of 12 o' clock and typically in the morning I'll try and map out, you know, what are the things that I want to get done that day.
And that is kind of the sit down, try and ignore everything else and just grind out reports.
And I find that time of the day and that kind of 45 minutes earlier is the best use for doing that kind of high value work.
Then back downstairs at about 12, lunch is kind of 45 minutes.
So we'll be all sat at the dinner table and then I'll disappear back upstairs and I'll typically be up here till and at 5 o' clock and then we'll have tea at 5.
So back downstairs then, so T's at 5 and then between 5 and 7ish.
You know, our kids are younger than yours. Our eldest is nine and our youngest is eight months.
So we'll do family worship at about half six and then some of the kids are in bed by seven and then I'll between seven and eight. We've got a home gym as well. It's not quite as grand as yours, I don't think, but we've squeezed it into a nice small room. In the uk I'll typically, I'll work out then.
And then after that it'll be a case of kind of just hanging out with my wife. So whether that's kind of reading or sitting outside with whiskey and a pipe and then bed for us is, I don't know, 10, half 10. Yeah. So that's kind of a typical day for us.
[00:36:59] Speaker B: What's your Saturdays like? Yeah, yeah, that's what I Want to know? Talk to me about that.
[00:37:04] Speaker A: So I get up at the same time and the morning is a little bit similar. So again I spend about an hour reading, maybe a little bit longer and then I might do an hour's worth of work, possibly depending how the week's gone. Breakfast is still. Well, I suppose breakfast is a little bit later typically and we'll have bacon as well on a Saturday morning. And so that'll be kind of say eight o', clock, a little bit after eight.
And at the moment, so we moved house about five weeks ago. So most of our Saturday is still kind of like I need to build that piece of IKEA furniture and I need to mow the lawn and I need to put this on the wall. So we're still, we're still trying to navigate that at the moment. So our Saturdays really, I wouldn't say there's a standard Saturday or a standard routine or anything like that on a, on a Friday night. We do actually make Friday nights a little bit different. We'll, we'll watch some tv. We'll be daring enough.
[00:37:53] Speaker B: So we'll watch TV with the kids.
[00:37:54] Speaker A: On a Friday night. Yeah, and then on a Saturday.
So we'll start preparing. So we like. You have like a Sabbath meal on the Saturday night. Yeah, on the Saturday night.
So we'll kind of start preparing for that. Chrissie, my wife, she'll be spending a lot of Saturday or a good section of Saturday kind of baking some sort of pudding, getting food ready and then yeah, very much sit down meal, have a family from church around maybe and then yeah, rest from, from that point on through the Lord's day.
[00:38:28] Speaker B: Man, that sounds glorious. That sounds glorious. So then, Lord, today, what does that look like for you?
[00:38:34] Speaker A: What does that look like? So yeah, we get up kind of the same sort of time again, spend quite a bit of time reading on a Lord's day morning. The kids, I think it's probably because their ages, you know, like this morning our 8 year old came downstairs and was, is it time to get up yet? And I mean I think it was 6 o' clock at that point. So they, yeah, they're not at the point where they need getting out of bed. No, it's not wake up time. Did you look at the clock? Go back upstairs for another half an hour. So Lord's day morning.
Yeah, I'll just be more relaxed.
So that's when we'll do kind of a bigger breakfast than normal and probably spend a bit more time kind of reading because I would. Yeah, I'D say that that is leisure time. That is. Yeah. There's a blessing in there. And after church in the morning and then in the afternoon, we typically have a family around for lunch and then spend.
I don't know, it'd be a very quiet, relaxed day at home, really. The kids might get their bikes out and cycle around the house.
[00:39:34] Speaker B: That's awesome. Yeah. Our Lord's day.
Super leisurely, too. We swim and we also have a tradition. We call it Sunday Sundays, as we will go and take the kids out for ice cream towards the end of it. And that's, you know, just. I try to find ways to make it fun. Like, I want to make this day special, as special as I can make it. So it's a nice way to kind of put the cap on it. Yeah. So it sounds like, Tom, you and I have a real problem with work life balance.
[00:40:02] Speaker A: Some people would say that.
[00:40:04] Speaker B: I think they would. I think they would. And I would argue that I have far more balance now than I did whenever I was worried more about my personal time.
And my kids are thriving. Like, they're just. It's amazing to watch them go through, like we talked about with my father earlier, go through difficult trials and come out the other side stronger and more committed to the mission and more fulfilled because of the good things that they get to do. My oldest and my youngest are taking piano lessons right now. They're taking them together, and it's actually a lot of fun. And I guess I can kind of. We could kind of wrap up with this anecdote, but you would be amazed at how motivated they are to work in this particular field now because they can see the tangible results of their work and see it quickly.
It's awesome to watch. They can see that they're getting better, and therefore that motivates them to work harder because they have fulfillment in this. Because we were made for this. We were made to work. And so we get to enjoy this good gift from the Lord together. It's not a curse, it's a blessing. And God uses it as a means to bless us and others. So lean in, baby. Lean in.
[00:41:26] Speaker A: My last kind of, I don't know, challenge or kind of point of thought would be people listening. Consider how you can integrate your family or expose your family to your work.
[00:41:38] Speaker B: Yes. Yes.
[00:41:40] Speaker A: I'm not suggesting cottage industry.
[00:41:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
But you could find a way to do it. Just.
I remember being a child, some of the best memories that I have are going to work with my dad and just like, seeing what he did sitting in his office, sitting in their little employee lounge.
Those are some of my favorite memories as a kid.
And I remember that. I remember those days far more vividly than I remember just sitting at my house in the summer and having nothing to do. I don't have vivid memories of those days. I do have vivid memories of going to work with my dad. There's opportunity here, man. There's opportunity.
[00:42:21] Speaker A: Take it. And what do you want to pass on to them? I want to pass on a stronger work ethic. I think an interesting question for another time is when you are dead, what do you want your children to remember of you?
[00:42:33] Speaker B: Yes, that'll change you quite a bit.
Amen.
Well, guys, thank you all so much for joining us for another episode of A Brit and a Yank Talk Business. I hope that you find this helpful and a blessing. If you have questions, you can send them to myself or to Tom, or you can provide them in the comments under this video or you can email them to me directly@stuart age50.com I'd be happy to field your questions and we'd be happy to talk about them more on future episodes. We hope that this work was a blessing to you and to others around you, and we hope that you have a new view on what it means to balance your work and your family life. Thank you guys so much for listening and we'll see you next time.
