Work-Life Harmony: Why High Performers Reject Balance for Intentional Planning

What if the concept of work-life balance is fundamentally flawed? What if, instead of trying to keep everything in perfect equilibrium, high performers should focus on creating harmony between their professional and personal lives? In my recent podcast conversation with Matt Bonelli, founder of multiple businesses including a real estate coaching organization and "Life at 10/10," we explored how intentional planning can replace the impossible pursuit of balance.

For Matt, high performance isn't about comparing yourself to others—it's about consistently improving and creating a life where business, family, relationships, and finances all harmonize together. Through his journey from Wall Street to entrepreneurship, Matt has developed frameworks that help real estate agents and other professionals design businesses that support their lives, rather than the other way around.

Let's dive into the key insights Matt shared about work-life harmony, intentional planning, and creating a high-performance lifestyle on your own terms.

Why Work-Life Balance "Sucks" (And What to Do Instead)

One of Matt's most provocative insights challenges the very concept of work-life balance:

"The first thing that I had to discover is that work-life balance sucks. It totally exists, and it's horrible. I did achieve it at one point, and I constantly felt stressed out making everything stay in balance."

The problem, Matt explains, is inherent in the concept itself:

"When you think of balance and you look at the scales, the only way for it to be in balance is if everything is equal."

This pursuit of perfect equilibrium creates constant tension and stress as we try to maintain an impossible standard. Matt observed that successful entrepreneurs like Gary Vaynerchuk often avoid directly answering questions about work-life balance, and he eventually realized why:

"There is no [balance]. It's a harmony, where life comes first. For a lot of entrepreneurs, maybe that means their business is the bigger part, but where they choose life first, they discover what is the life that I want to live, then everything harmonizes in with business."

Matt references Grant Cardone's approach: "I built my business to support the lifestyle that I wanted." This fundamental shift—putting life first and building business around it—transforms how high performers approach their careers and personal lives.

From Balance to Harmony: A Musical Metaphor

To illustrate the difference between balance and harmony, Matt uses a musical metaphor:

"Think of a balanced piece of music. How boring would that be? If we want to have fun, it's got to harmonize together."

Just as music becomes beautiful through the interplay of different instruments, tempos, and volumes, our lives become more fulfilling when we allow different elements to complement each other rather than forcing them to remain equal. Sometimes work takes center stage, while at other times family, health, or personal development becomes the focus—but all elements work together to create something greater than the sum of its parts.

Intentional Planning: Taking Control of Your Days

For high performers, intentionality is everything. Matt challenges a common mindset he sees among real estate professionals:

"I always got asked the question like, 'Hey, what do you love about being a real estate agent?' and people say, 'Man, because every day is different.' I'm like, if every day is different, we have a problem, because you're not managing your days. You're just waiting for the day to give you something that's different and exciting."

Rather than reacting to whatever each day brings, Matt advocates for proactive planning:

"If you don't know what's happening tomorrow, we got a problem, because you don't know if your priorities are going to be the priority tomorrow. And if they're not on the calendar, I'll tell you this right now—they're not going to be the priority, because there's going to be an email or a text or something that comes in, and you're going to make that the priority instead of your life."

The Power of Calendar Blocking

Matt's solution is comprehensive calendar blocking—not just for work appointments, but for everything that matters:

"If you want to start to build out that harmony, just like music doesn't necessarily happen by accident, you have to plan it out."

This includes:

• Morning workout routines
• Family time in the evenings
• Personal development activities
• Even "doing nothing" time

"If you fill up the calendar, dead space on the calendar is a recipe for letting somebody else come in and control it. Even if you want to do nothing, then block out a spot and just say, 'I'm doing nothing for these three hours.' That'll give you the freedom to make sure that nothing else gets put in there."

This approach gives high performers control over their time, ensuring that their highest priorities—whether personal or professional—receive the attention they deserve.

Building an Enduring Business Through Self-Care

While some entrepreneurs believe they need to sacrifice everything for their business, especially in the early stages, Matt advocates for a more sustainable approach:

"If you want to have an enduring business, well, I need to then make sure I have an endurance mind and an endurance body."

He acknowledges that young entrepreneurs can often get away with grinding for a while:

"When I was younger, and for young guys, that can work because you are young and you have that extra energy. You still have some hormones working in your favor. But at some point, you're going to be exhausted and tired and broken, and then you're going to have to rebuild."

The alternative is taking care of yourself from the beginning:

"If you take care of yourself along the entire way, if you eat right, if you sleep, if you exercise, if you make sure you're not sitting in that chair all day, you're going to have more endurance to then get through this marathon of business."

The Water Effect: Small Improvements for Big Results

One surprisingly simple but powerful habit Matt emphasizes is proper hydration:

"After I did 75 Hard for the first time, I never recognized how much water changed my energy throughout the day. Water is my performance drug, for sure."

He explains the cognitive impact of even mild dehydration:

"If you want to be high performance, the smallest bit of dehydration, your cognitive function starts to decline. When your heart rate's normal and you're sitting there trying to make a decision on whether to send the next email or make the next phone call, if you're a little bit dehydrated, you're probably going to be like, 'No, I'll just do it tomorrow.' But if you're hydrated and you're clear, you're going to do that small little extra bit that's going to produce results."

These small performance improvements, when stacked day after day, can create significant differences in outcomes over time. Matt has observed this effect not just in himself but in the real estate professionals he coaches:

"When they're dehydrated and they come to a coaching call, I can tell their energy's down. I'm like, 'Go get some water,' and it immediately comes back, and we get clear, and we're able to take better action."

Building a Relationship-Based Business That Supports Your Life

At the core of Matt's coaching philosophy is the belief that business—particularly real estate—is fundamentally relationship-based:

"Real estate and every business, for that matter, is a relationship-based business. Whereas a lot of businesses will start with kind of top of funnel thought processes, how do I just get leads in the door, we look at okay, who's already here? Who's our relationships? Who do we have? Who can we build stronger relationships with?"

This approach challenges the common practice of purchasing leads:

"Every lead, traditional lead that comes in on real estate, somebody clicks on a button for a stranger real estate agent they don't know, is a lost relationship. I mean, there's 1.6 million realtors in the United States now. That's a lot. And yes, there's about, last year there was about 4 million home sales. Many of those people found a stranger real estate agent to do a deal with, and that's a shame."

Instead, Matt advocates for securing relationships first:

"If we start by securing our relationships and build trust with our people, the business is going to flow to us. Now, then you got to build a discipline and a routine of high-frequency communication, high-value communication, but it doesn't have to be about real estate."

This relationship-first approach naturally aligns with the work-life harmony concept—when your business is built on authentic relationships, the line between personal and professional naturally blurs in positive ways:

"You might be selling your best friend's house. You're on the mountain, you're going mountain biking one day, and the next day you're showing houses together. That's the beauty of a business like that, or any business. If you build those relationships, you can do business with your friends."

Matt rejects the conventional wisdom about not mixing friendship and business:

"I don't like the phrase, 'Oh, don't mix friendships and business.' That's for people who don't believe in what they do for business, and they don't believe that they can perform for their friends. That's why they don't want to mix it."

Conclusion: Creating Your High-Performance Lifestyle

Through his journey from Wall Street to entrepreneurship, Matt has developed a framework for high performance that prioritizes life design over rigid balance. By rejecting the idea of perfect equilibrium between work and personal life, he embraces harmony—where different elements work together to create something beautiful.

The key elements of this approach include:

1. Define your ideal lifestyle first, then build your business to support it
2. Plan intentionally by blocking your calendar for everything that matters
3. Take care of your physical health through proper hydration, exercise, and rest
4. Build a business on authentic relationships rather than transactional interactions
5. Create systems that allow you to focus on what you enjoy and delegate the rest

As Matt emphasizes, high performance isn't about comparing yourself to others—it's about consistently improving and creating a fulfilling life:

"I think it's there's how people qualify what is high performance, and it's usually comparison against other people who are performing high. And I think you can use that as a benchmark, but really, I look at it as, 'Hey, am I performing better than I am yesterday and at the best of my abilities?'"

Ultimately, this approach allows entrepreneurs to build successful businesses while enjoying meaningful personal lives—not through perfect balance, but through intentional harmony.