Has our devotion to work and hustle turned into the UnAmerican Dream?

Some of the hardest working people I know are in sales and marketing.

We often read success stories about how hustle and grit drove fantastic success.

That said, the relentless pursuit of success can leave behind damaged relationships and personal life carnage in its wake.

Take me, for example.

Shortly after building up and selling a successful company, my 17-year marriage ended.

There’s a reason entrepreneurs have a higher divorce rate.

For me. My pursuit of business success left my health and my personal relationships in a severe need of help.

I needed to redefine the kind of life I wanted to live, make different choices, and set better boundaries.

It wasn’t easy.

Now, my health, relationships, and personal and professional happiness are so much better.

That’s why I was excited to interviewed Carlos Hidalgo (@cahidalgo), CEO of Digital Exhaust and author of the new book The UnAmerican Dream.

In this interview, you’ll hear Carlos’s story about finding personal and professional happiness and establishing work-life boundaries.

This is a must-read for sellers, marketers, and entrepreneurs.

Can you tell our listeners a little bit about your background?

Carlos:  Yeah. Hey Brian. Always a pleasure to talk to you. I have been in B2B marketing and sales for over 20 years. I think right now it’s about 25 years, which is hard to believe.

I’ve been both client-side, and then in 2005, I co-founded an agency. That agency is still running. I left that agency at the end of 2016, beginning of 2017 to start another business. So, could say I’m a bit of an entrepreneur. I love creating things.

Now, I work with B2B companies in the whole area of customer experience under the new brand VisumCX, and then just wrote my second book.

The first book was on demand generation, so if you ever have insomnia, go for it. You can read that.

But this book was the UnAmerican Dream, which is more my story and a whole lot more personal than the first one.

Why did you write The UnAmerican Dream?

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Brian: Can you tell the story about why you wrote this book, The UnAmerican Dream, and why now?

Carlos:  Yeah, great question. When I left Annuitas, which was the first company that I had co-founded and started, I put a post on LinkedIn about why I was going.

It was more to get back to what I should have been doing in the first place, which was cultivating those meaningful relationships, especially with my children and marriage.

I was struck by the number of calls and emails I got from fellow entrepreneurs and fellow business leaders who were saying,

“So, how did you do this? What steps did you take because I am at my wit’s end? I’m never seeing my family,” or “My marriage is falling apart,” or insert whatever they were going through.

I was shocked.

Wow, this is not just me going through this.

So, that’s why.

But the why now, is the idea of that book came to me over two years ago.

But I needed to work on me first.

I had to get some things straight in me, and one of those things that I start with the introduction, I believe, saying I first had the idea in 2016.

When I told somebody the title, they said, “It sounds like an angry book.”

I believe if I had written it then, it would have been an angry book because I had a lot of things that I had to work through and deconstruct some things that I had held to be true which weren’t right.

So, I needed to wait. Waiting, I believe, made it a much more authentic book, a much more vulnerable book, but not an angry book in any way.

Walking away from the UnAmerican Dream

Brian:    I’m going to ask the same question you got asked by many people on LinkedIn. How did you walk away from this UnAmerican dream, and what do you mean by that?

Carlos:  Yeah. Wow. How I did it … From the outside, it probably seemed like, oh, he woke up one day and was like, “I’m done.”

It was a 10-month process for me. I really wrestled with the decision. And you know, Brian, you’ve started businesses. You’re an entrepreneur yourself.

When you start something from scratch, and you put everything you have into it, you really … The term I hear often is, “This is my baby.”

I wanted to make sure that, first and foremost, I had come to a place where I’m like, “I’ve got to do everything I can to get back those relationships that I had neglected for so long.”

So, I tried to do that within the context of the first business.

That took me 10 months.

I kept wrestling with what should I do and how should I do it?

Getting the courage to make the decision

Carlos:  It was a conversation which I’ve told many times, so I want to elaborate in case there’s an overlap with people who have heard this before.

But, a conversation with a colleague in the lobby of the Westin who encouraged me.

He said, “You know what you need to do. You just need the courage to do it.”

I called Suzanne, my wife, at that point, a few hours later and said, “I’m leaving.”

When it came down to it, I really just pulled the ripcord because I didn’t have a big buyout waiting. I didn’t have this significant hoard of cash in the savings account where I could run for months and months.

It was a risk.

It was scary.

It was like, “Okay, so what am I going to do now?”

But everything panned out, and everything worked out. I would do it again in a heartbeat. It was the best professional decision I ever made.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

Brian:    Well, Carlos, for our listeners, it will come through. You and I are good friends. I was just thinking about you as an entrepreneur and as I know you. I mean, entrepreneurship is in your blood. It’s part of your history, part of your family history.

As I was reading the book, you wrote about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What’s getting in the way of that?

Carlos:  Wow, so much is getting in the way of that. I think, first and foremost, is we as Americans are on this treadmill and this pace, and we have made work our God.

We work more than any other group, any other nationality in the world.

So, just think about that. I just read a stat last week where 32% of Millennials will not take more than a four-night vacation because of work. 70% of the population says, “I don’t have work-life balance.”

I was at Nashville this last weekend, and the people we stayed with, he’s like, “I didn’t take all my vacation. I can’t.”

I think part of what’s getting in the way of our happiness is we’re slaves to our jobs, we’re slaves to our career, we’re slaves to our businesses, and that’s a choice that we have made.

I know people will debate me on that all day long, but it is a choice that we have made.

Quitting weekend work

I literally, before this, saw a LinkedIn post that said, “If you’re reading this on the weekend, it’s clear that you’re a top performer.”

So, if you’re not connected to your profession on the weekend, the message is that you’re not a top performer.

That is a total fallacy because I don’t work weekends anymore. I used to all the time. I don’t any longer.

That means I’m not on LinkedIn, I’m not promoting anything, I’m not doing anything for my clients, and everybody knows that.

That’s a boundary I chose. I think that’s one thing.

How social media impacts happiness

The other thing that I think that it’s really getting in the way of our happiness is social media, and these stinking things. We are so attached to, and I will use the word addiction, to our devices, and to social media.

To the point where we’ll put something on Facebook and then 20 minutes later we’re going and seeing how many likes.

We retweet.

“How many followers do I have?”

We have created what I call social loneliness where we are so socially connected, but we are so utterly lonely because people don’t really know us.

We haven’t built a relationship, and as human beings, we’re wired for connection.

I think when we put those things ahead of what we’re wired for, our happiness or our ability to choose joy, severely wanes.

Brian:    There’s so much there, Carlos, as I’m listening to you. Something I remember from a conversation you and I had a while ago, and you had been going back to when I was trying to start my company again, as I was starting something new. You talked about setting boundaries instead of trying to get a work-life balance. Why is that?

Why Focus on work-life boundaries, not balance

I don’t believe in work-life balance because I tried it for … At different parts of my career, I tried it.

At other parts, I was like, “I’m completely unbalanced, and I’m good with that.”

Now, when I think about it makes me want to shake my head.

The stats will show you 70% saying I can’t achieve work-life balance. So, when I see that, I know the reality is it doesn’t exist.