Balancing Work & Family: The STRUGGLE

Yo, you always hear the saying, if you do what you love, you'll never have to work another day in your life. That is complete bullshit. I'm Christopher Rhodes, Chris, YC, whatever you want to call me. And I'm a workaholic, man. I can't even lie. Coming up as a kid, I would say I had it pretty sweet, to be honest. Like, I didn't get everything in the world I wanted, but at the same time, I never went without anything that I needed. Pre-teenage life for me was pretty much every single game system out there. PlayStation, N64, all that good stuff. Every single shoe I wanted. But as a teenager, nah. Basically, when I turned 13, everything that I wanted, I had to work for. This meant doing well in school, which I ******* sucked at, cutting grass, shoveling snow, and stealing. I did a lot of stealing as a kid. Fast forward to the Twitter and MySpace era. I was designing to make my money. I was doing layouts, covers, flyers, anything, basically anything to get money, man. I've been super into sneakers my whole life, so I was basically just trying to uphold this lifestyle that I had been living. Coming up in the golden age of Twitter, you had to be no sleep gang. Pound no sleep gang. It was me, my boys, we all just sat in my mom's basement every night, every day, and we just tried to figure it out, man. We were just in there grinding. By the way, I'm not no sleep gang anymore. I love sleep. I get as much sleep as possible. But those times stuck with me in a sense of, if you want something, go get it. It's no other way. Nobody's gonna hand anything to you. I glamorize those times now when I talk about them, but it was some darkness in there, man. When my mom decided to sell the house, my brother and I, we had to figure it out, and fast, I'm talking a couple months fast. So I got an apartment, and that changed things for the worst emotionally. I went through a lot of financial anxiety at that time. It was a constant fear, it was a constant worry in the back of my brain at all times that I could lose this little bit that I had. I felt like I had to work all day, every day, and any moment that I wasn't working was just a waste of time. Imagine being this teenager, having no worries in the world, being able to spend all of your money on fashion and shoes and clothes, and being a cool guy, to then having to spend all of your money on frozen pizza, sandwich meat, rent, gas, all the whack stuff in life. Like, that shit sucked to me. And just when I thought shit sucked the most, it got worse. My high school girlfriend, now my fiance, we had just found out that we had a baby on the way. Chris and I have known each other for 10 years, about 10 years. We met in high school. We met high school freshman year, and we had like almost all our classes together. So we kind of just had to run into each other all the time. When I found out we were having a baby on the way, I was excited because I think for a long time, it was something that I wanted for a long time. I didn't know that I wanted it, but then when it happened, it felt real. So I was like really, really excited. So when I was pregnant, our living situation was pretty inconsistent, I guess. We kind of jumped from place to place. We lived with some of his roommates for a while, and then off with siblings for a while. So it wasn't anything stable. We kind of just did what we had to do. I was supposed to look at the camera or not? I was looking at the camera. Our living situation felt just rocky. I didn't really put too much thought into that. In particular, I just felt secure that we were together. So wherever we were, that's just what it was. I didn't really complain about it. So we finally got out of Iman's house. Then we moved into a house with Millie's mom. All the walls in this house were green. It was like the shittiest experience to film in. Like it wasn't an amazing place, but we had a place that we could close the door. It was a lot to us. It was a lot more freedom. And it felt like we were actually on the up and up in life. At that time, I was going to New York almost every other week. I had a lot of bookings. I was getting money. Like things were finally going up for us. I saved up some money and we moved into our first apartment together as a family. And this changed everything. Did you at least have fun? You sound like a hater. Fast forward to a brand new city, an amazing house, 280,000 subscribers, and I'm still working my ass off like I'm poor. I don't remember ever fighting with Chris over working, ever. Ready to answer questions? All right, cool. Y'all have a moment of silence. Okay. Do you think that daddy works too often? Yeah, um, I don't. You can just answer. Answer what you think. It's no right or wrong answer, okay? Do you think that daddy works a lot or too much? He works a lot. Do you think I work too much? No. Um, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Is there any answers? You can answer however you want. However you feel. I'll say a lot. But do you think I work too much though? Um, no. No, I don't work too much. You're trying to be nice. Okay, so do you wish I would work less? What'd you say? Do you wish I would work less? No. No, you want me to work more? You just answered a question, so whatever. So do you think I work all day? Probably, um, yeah. Oh, is that a bad thing or is that a good thing? I can't know, but that's okay with me. Is that okay with you? No, it's not okay with me. I want to work less, is that cool? Yeah. All right. Yeah, but why do you want to work less? So we can go more time together. Okay. That would be fun, right? Yeah. All right. Every down moment I get, it's always an urge to do some kind of work. Whether it's me checking emails at the dinner table, replying to YouTube comments, or working on days when I'm supposed to be off, I have the hardest time in the world doing nothing. Like that is so boring to me and I feel so much anxiety that I need to be doing something. Throughout the process of figuring out the balance of family and work, these are three things that I stand by. Number one is create a schedule with time boundaries. It's so easy for me to be at the desk and say, oh, I'm just going to finish this up. I'm going to do this real fast. Next thing you know, five hours has flown by and I've completely let my family down. Writing down a schedule of things I have to do and having a time limit for these things has helped me tremendously. Not only am I giving my family more time, but it's actually forcing me to buckle down and maximize the amount of work that I can get done in the time limit that I've set for myself to work for the day. I find that this works best on a whiteboard, but the Stiggies application on Mac has been tremendous as well. It's always dope to be able to see this list of tasks that you have in front of you and it never leaves. It's always in front of you while you sit on your computer working or scrolling or BSing or doing whatever you do. Number two is include family into my work whenever I can. Not to the point where I'm only doing family things because it benefits work, but if I could take my son to the park and get a camera test in at the same time, that's a win in my books. This video right here that I'm filming has been mad fun because I'm able to incorporate my wife. I'm able, my wife, man, wife soon. I'm able to incorporate my fiance. I'm able to incorporate my son. They're having fun. They feel included. It's an inclusive thing. Nobody feels left out. So I love to include my family into my work whenever I can. And number three is leave my phone in the office when I'm done working. Now this is hard. This is something that I'll go on a long run of like two weeks doing, and then I'll slowly drift back into my ways of taking my phone upstairs and deliver them into bed. But I do find that when I leave my phone in my office after I'm done working, it's the best for me socially and actually being present when I'm with my family. I sleep better. I pay attention to family when I'm around them. It's just all around a better experience. My notifications on my phone will be there in the morning. They're never gonna leave. Everything that I just saw on my Instagram, my Twitter timeline is still gonna be there. Just leaving the phone in the office helps a lot. For my family's sake and projects like this, I archive every single photo and video that I've ever captured. It makes it way easier for me to tell stories like this one, but when I don't have the footage to tie my story together, I use Storyblocks. Being able to download 4K clips and use them royalty free without the fear of being copyright striked is so dope to me. I'm gonna leave a link down in the description for you guys to check out Storyblocks. You can download as many clips, After Effects templates, and motion backgrounds as you need when you sign up for an unlimited plan. If you guys have any advice on balancing family and work life, do me a favor, head down to the comment section and drop a comment below. I would appreciate it, and I'm sure everybody here would appreciate it as well. If you're new here to the channel, consider subscribing. I make videos about creating video content. I do a little bit of everything, so consider hitting that subscribe button. If you guys enjoyed this video, make sure to drop it a like. I'm out, guys. Peace. ♪♪♪