“The joke in the office was that when it came to work-life balance, work came first, life came second, and trying to find the balance came last.”
- Former Amazon employee Jason Merkoski
URBAN Meyer has won the top college title in American Football, the NCAA Championship, three times as a coach.
He has worked with college football teams in America for more than two decades.
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Urban’s father Bud idolised Woody Hayes, who won five national championship across 27 years coaching Ohio State.
His entire thesis on life and football was simple. If you work hard enough, it will happen.
In a commencement speech given to students at the university, Hayes told part of his story.
“So many times you have found here at the University people who were smarter than you. I found them all the way through college and in football: bigger, faster, harder. They were smarter people than I. But you know what they couldn’t do? They couldn’t outwork me.
“I ran into opposing coaches who had much better backgrounds than I did and knew a lot more about football than I did. But they couldn’t work as long as I did. They couldn’t stick in there as long as I could. You can outwork anybody. Try it and you’ll find out you can do it.”
Urban Meyer became a successful coach in his own right.
But like all success, it had a cost.
His health, for one.
The great American sportswriter Wright Thompson published a fascinating piece on Meyer in his book ‘The Cost Of These Dreams’.
In it, Thompson tells of how he would lost 15lb every year he coached at Bowling Green.
At Utah, he was “unable to eat or shave, rethinking things as fundamental as the punt.”
But the most significant cost was to his family.
Thompson’s piece begins with the story of how his middle child, Gigi, had planned a celebration to formally accept a college volleyball scholarship.
She checked his calendar, scheduled it around him.
As she stood at the top table, Gigi thanked her mother for being there year after year.
“Then she turned to her father. He’d missed almost everything. ‘You weren’t there’, she told him,” Thompson wrote.
It is a great secret of GAA journalism that when an inter-county player turns 30, an internal memo is triggered.
It states that this player can no longer be interviewed in any form without being asked about when he plans to retire.
Inflationary pressures could push the lower-age limit to 29 soon.
Players are physically able to play for longer now than ever.
In the last few weeks alone, we’ve had Michael Murphy coming back out of retirement and Conor McManus conceding he might not go into it just yet.
For a lot of players, the physical side of it is becoming increasingly secondary.
They can hack the miles alright.
The question that mushrooms until it takes over all other perspectives is whether the juice is worth the squeeze.
We live in a madly imbalanced world.
Lately that has been troubling me.
One afternoon last week, I stumbled upon Forbes’ billionaires list.
Jeff Bezos was second to Elon Musk.
Bezos’ net worth is $241 billion.
A 2021 study found that almost half of American citizens were either living in poverty or were one missed paycheck or emergency away from it.
I struggle to understand why that is allowed to happen, why individual wealth can’t be capped.
What possible need could any single human being have for $241bn worth of assets?
I’m naïve like that.
The quote from Jason Merkoski at the top of the page sums up the drive started by Bezos that permeates every pore at Amazon.
To succeed, you cannot have balance.
If you want to live, live.
If you want to work, work. But you can’t do both.
In sport as in business, greatness and success are derived from imbalance.
Though what about when signing up to the imbalance guarantees you nothing?
In the course of the 2018 ESRI report into the demands of playing inter-county GAA, one workshop discussed how few players have children and how “family formation can be affected.”
Right now, we are in the middle of GAA wedding season.
No self-respecting footballer gets married between January 30 and November 1.
Everyone that does it because they have aspirations and they want to be something, someone who is remembered for what they achieved on a football field.
Demarcation lines in the home have changed.
Paternal expectations are very different than they once were.
Providing financially is a two-person job now.
Partly as a result of that, fathers are spending much more time with their kids.
The pangs of leaving home to go to training three or four nights a week and then away for a weekend to matches are very real.
The guilt is enormous.
How to find the right balance when being present runs directly against the direction of travel for greatness?
Most people find it alright.
It’s hard to know what to feel towards those who don’t - admiration for trying or pity for failing?
The balance is almost impossible to get right.
Time is precious but so is everything else.
You can only do so much in a day, and you can do so much with a life.
Greatness only grows from the soil of sacrifice.
Playing inter-county GAA is becoming less and less compatible with modern life.
More worryingly, the club game is too.
A lot of men my age that would otherwise still be playing retired because the balance between football and family just wasn’t right, and they weren’t willing to sacrifice it.
The juice is only worth the squeeze if you win.