The average American is typically pretty content with working a 9-5 job, making a decent salary, and taking the occasional vacation. But to be a successful person and lead a luxurious lifestyle, one multimillionaire founder says it’s time to come to terms with the fact that work-life balance doesn’t really exist.
“If you are leading an extraordinary life to think that extraordinary effort wouldn’t be coupled to that somehow is crazy,” Emma Grede, founder and CEO of Good American and Skims founding partner, told The Diary of a CEO podcast.
If it’s possible to have true work-life balance, “tell me who she is, and I’ll show you a liar,” Grede continued.
She added that while she’s in Malibu most weekends on the beach, successful people still “have to have a level of honesty about what it takes to be really successful.” According to Grede, that takes waking up most days “being 150%” and doing some type of work.
Several other high-profile CEOs, executives, and celebrities have also dismissed the idea true work-life balance can exist.
“There’s no way to balance. Work is life, life is work,’” Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said in an interview with the Grit podcast. Musician Will.i.am also told Fortune Gen Z should ditch the idea of work-life balance if they want to build something, and Cava CEO Brett Schulman also told Fortune work-life balance is a myth.
Grede, who is worth an estimated $300 million to $400 million (making her one of the richest self-made women in America), said she thinks she has a decent work-life balance now, that didn’t come to her easily. Grede grew up in east London and Essex, and was one of four daughters raised by a single mother who worked full-time at Morgan Stanley. At age 12, Grede left home at 5 a.m. each day for her paper route, and has always maintained that hardworking mindset.
“I am unashamadely focused on making money,” she told The Times in a 2022 profile. “I’ve never really had a problem talking about it. People talk about their purpose and why they do their jobs—I wanted to be able to afford a certain lifestyle. Money has always been a pillar for me, because I didn’t have any [growing up].”
Grede attended the London College of Fashion, but left to work in the fashion and events industry rather than completing a traditional degree. She worked at luxury concierge firm Quintessentially and later served as a fashion show and events producer at Inca Productions.
At age 26, she launched Independent Talent Brand (ITB), a talent management and entertainment marketing agency connecting brands to high-profile talent. This laid the groundwork for her subsequent celebrity-led ventures, like working with Skims founder Kim Kardashian. She also founded Good American, a size-inclusive jeans brand, with Kardashian, and Safely, a plant-powered home cleaning and self-care line, with Kris Jenner.
The ‘social contract’ in the workplace
Instead of subscribing to work-life balance in the traditional sense, Grede said founders should instead treat their relationship with their employees as a “social contract.”
“It’s like you’re going to work really hard, and in return, you should get an amazing place to work,” she told The Diary of a CEO. “We do things for our employees that are above and beyond what a workplace back in the day may have considered the norm.”
She gave the example of in-office fertility seminars, teaching hundreds of people all about having their eggs frozen.
But aside from offering a stellar place to work, Grede argued the onus of constructing work-life balance is actually on employees.
That includes “how you’re going to pick up your kids, how you get home, how you get to work … these are all things that you need to figure out within the construct of your life,” she said. “That isn’t the employer’s job; that isn’t the employer’s responsibility.”
To be sure, Grede acknowledged the general expectation at her companies isn’t that everyone is going to have to work seven days a week. But “if you have ambition, if you want to do the most, if you want to grow, if you want to be one of those people that’s like at the top of the organization, the chances are you might have to work a little bit more.”
