🌵 7 Principles That Can Help You Build a Rich, Balanced Life

Most people don’t drift into a balanced life.

They drift into a busy one.

A rich, grounded, meaningful life — one where your time, energy, relationships, and finances align — is something you build through intentional choices. Not perfection. Direction. And the willingness to live in a way that reflects what matters most.

If you want the backstory behind how these principles emerged, I wrote about the moment everything shifted for me.

Here are seven principles that helped me rebuild a balanced life — and that can help you build yours.

1. Start Your Day With Intention

A balanced life begins before the world wakes up.

For me, that means early mornings — usually 5:00am — when the house is quiet, the gym is empty, and the day hasn’t made any demands yet. It’s the one part of the day that feels entirely mine. Some mornings I’m at the gym, some mornings I’m reading, reflecting, or writing — but what I’m not doing anymore is grinding at my laptop at 5am. Those early hours are for things that grow me and center me.

Then I take the dog on a short walk and try to actually see the world around me — the colors of the sunrise, the clarity of the sky, the small beauty that’s easy to miss when life gets loud.

Since COVID, many of us lost our commute — and that daily 45-90 minutes quietly got absorbed into more work. Most people never got it back. I work from home most of the time now, so I made a conscious choice to reclaim that window: my morning rhythm is the old commute, repurposed. On those occasional days I have to go into the office, I use the drive for podcasts on FI, financial principles, and health — small inputs that continue to shape who I'm becoming. Most days, the old "evening commute" becomes pickleball.

Your version might look different. The point is to begin your day on purpose, not in reaction.

If you’re trying to build a clearer sense of direction, this is the approach I use to map out a financial life that actually aligns with who I’m becoming.

2. Turn Off the Noise

When I was out of balance, my phone was basically a slot machine — buzzing, blinking, demanding attention. Every notification pulled me away from the people and moments right in front of me.

So I made a simple change with disproportionate impact:

I turned off Outlook and instant‑message notifications on my phone and tablet.

At work, people can reach me on my laptop.

At home, on weekends, or on vacation, I check messages on my terms. I’m not off the grid — I check in periodically and stay responsive — but I’m no longer obsessed over my Teams status and chained to my desk.

This matters most when I’m away with my family. The last thing I want is to be standing on a boat in Capri, ready to snorkel in one of the most beautiful places on earth, and suddenly see a politically complicated email thread with senior leaders cc’d. That can wait until I’m back at the hotel.

Even during the workweek, this rhythm helps. In meetings, I’m more present. With my team, I model restraint and thoughtfulness. With peers, I show that not every message requires an instant reply.

Sometimes balance begins with silence.

3. Choose Your Time Wisely

Not all hours are created equal.

My best thinking happens in the morning — that’s when I’m most creative, strategic, and focused. So I protect that time for deep work, planning, writing, and problem solving. It’s not perfect — meetings sometimes land where they land — but to the extent I can, I protect my mornings because that’s when I do my best work.

Every Monday morning, I block off time to set my weekly priorities:

What 3–4 critical things do I want to accomplish at work, in my personal life, and socially?

It’s a simple practice, but it keeps me oriented toward what matters instead of getting lost in the noise. It keeps me from confusing activity with progress.

Meetings?

I try to keep those in the afternoons when conversation comes more naturally.

And when the weather is great, I take 1:1s outside — on the patio, on a walk, or even old‑school on the phone. I’ll encourage the other person to walk too. People appreciate sunlight, movement, and the rare gift of being off camera for an hour.

Balance isn’t just about how much time you have.

It’s about how you use the time you have.

This was one of the hardest lessons for me to learn, and it’s a big part of what pushed me to rethink the life I had built.

4. Choose Presence Over Urgency

For years, I always chose the aisle seat so I could sprint off the plane and get to the next thing. It was symbolic of how I lived — rushing, competing, constantly moving.

These days, I choose the window.

A few weeks ago, on a flight to Seattle, I looked out and saw the Grand Canyon glowing in the early morning sun. A couple hours later, Mount Rainier rose above the clouds like a cathedral. Almost everyone around me missed both moments — heads down, screens glowing.

It stopped me. I read. I journaled. I prayed. I thought about the future. And I remembered that life is bigger than the next meeting, the next email, the next deadline.

As Ferris Bueller once said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” And on that flight, I realized how often I had.

There’s an ancient line of wisdom that captured exactly how I lived during those years:

“It is in vain that you rise early and stay up late, eating the bread of anxious toil…” —Psalm 127:2

It was a mirror — and an invitation to live differently.

When you choose presence over urgency, you gain perspective — and peace.

5. Build a Body That Can Carry Your Future

In my 20s, when I was time‑rich but income‑poor, I used the time well — running, training, and building endurance. But during my corporate ladder‑climbing years, I lost that rhythm. I walked, hiked, skied a few times a year, snorkeled on vacations — but I didn’t understand the value of strength training or intense cardio. I hiked a lot in our early Arizona years, but during the Minnesota years — the heavy corporate grind years — it was almost nonexistent. Only after moving west again did it become a consistent rhythm.

The last three years have been different.

I started working with a trainer two or three times a week. I’ve lost 30 pounds and gained muscle, but I’m still very much a work‑in‑progress, unworking years of neglect, inch by inch, rep by rep. I picked up pickleball — a sneaky‑good way to get cardio, make new friends at open play, and have fun. And I’m pushing heavier weights than I ever expected at this stage of life.

Some of you have been doing this all along — but many of us, especially in demanding careers, let our bodies fall to the bottom of the list.

A rich life requires energy.

A balanced life requires strength. The same principle showed up for me on a glacier at Whistler this spring — Fresh Tracks is about what happens when you keep showing up for the mountain.

A meaningful life requires a body that can carry you into the future you’re building.

6. Invest in Deep Community

A balanced life is built with people, not productivity.

This past year, I’ve been reconnecting with old friends I hadn’t talked to in years. I once read a line that said as we get older, we tend to regret more of the things we didn’t do. The truth of it stands.

Recently, I caught up with a friend I hadn’t spoken to in 20 years. He’s now an author and podcaster—when I knew him, he was an intern—and our conversation was a gift — full of wisdom, laughter, and shared history.

Last year in L.A., I reached out to another friend from high school. We ended up running around a neighborhood looking for this underground backyard seafood spot we’d heard about — the kind of place locals swear by. It was an adventure, but even better was seeing how he’d turned his dream of working in the music industry into reality.

And this spring, friends from my nonprofit days are coming to Arizona. We’re sharing our love of Sedona with them — hiking, mountain biking, eating great food, and sharing life in one of the most beautiful places on earth.

Community is one of the greatest forms of wealth.

7. Design Rest Into Your Life

Rest doesn’t happen by accident. You have to design it.

For us, these days, that means:

• two weeks off at Christmas

• spring break skiing

• a summer trip to Europe, national parks, or Hawaii

• a fall getaway with my spouse

• weekends in Sedona when we can

• time outside every day, feet in the grass, sun on my face

And increasingly, it means embracing Sabbath rhythms — not in a religiously rigid way, but in a restorative one. Many of the world’s faith traditions share this pattern: work hard for six days, rest on the seventh.

For me, that looks like workouts, family time, errands, and budgeting on Saturdays. Sundays begin with my morning routine, then pickleball, church, lunch with friends, and time with my 94‑year‑old mom. It’s a 24‑hour window where the pace slows and the soul resets.

You may not have a Sedona near you — but you probably have a version of it: a mountain town, a lake, a state park, or a place within a two‑ or three‑hour drive where you can re‑energize a few times a year.

Rest is a rhythm, not a reward. And financial independence — especially the FINE version of it — is ultimately what makes that rhythm sustainable long-term. I wrote about that connection here. And if you want to see the math behind why FINE makes that rest sustainable — The Harder Trail breaks it down.

The Invitation

You don’t need to master all seven principles at once.

Choose one.

Start small.

Build slowly.

A rich, balanced life isn’t built in a weekend.

It’s built through intentional choices, repeated over time, that align your life with what matters most — and over time, clarity grows, margin grows, freedom grows. One intentional step at a time.

The trail is better with good company.

-🌵Desert FI

If this was helpful…

If you want a practical way to put these principles into motion, this is the roadmap I've been using. If you want to go deeper on what that next chapter looks like — The Harder Trail is where the FINE framework lives."

If this resonated, subscribe to the Desert FI newsletter below — and if someone in your life is navigating a similar season, feel free to bring them along on the trail.