Let me say something that will probably make half of social media want to argue with me.

Going all in is some of the worst advice you will ever receive.

There. I said it. And before you close this tab, hear me out. Because I’m not telling you to be lazy. I’m not telling you to settle. I’m not giving you permission to coast. I’m going to make the opposite argument, that going all in on one thing is actually the path most likely to leave you exhausted, unbalanced, and ultimately, quietly miserable. Even if it works.

The Problem With the Advice

Every day, someone with a large platform, a bestselling book, or a TED talk will tell you to go all in. Burn the boats. Obsess. Sacrifice. Give everything to the one thing.

Here’s what nobody talks about: we only hear from the people it worked for.

This is survivorship bias at its most powerful. The people who went all in and won have a platform, a voice, a story worth telling. The thousands who went all in and lost everything, the business owners who sacrificed their health, their relationships and their savings on a venture that didn’t make it, the athletes who gave their bodies and their twenties to a sport that ended with an injury, the entrepreneurs who missed their children growing up in pursuit of a exit that never came, those people are quiet. They don’t have a podcast. They’re not on stage at conferences. Their story doesn’t sell.

So we are left with a deeply skewed picture of what going all in actually produces. We see the wins. We don’t see the wreckage.

But What If It Does Work?

Here’s the part people really don’t want to hear. Let’s set aside the failures entirely and talk about the successes. Let’s say going all in works. Let’s say you get there. What life have you built?

Michael Phelps won 23 Olympic gold medals. He is, by any measure, the greatest swimmer who ever lived. He went all in completely, years of his life given over to one pursuit, one identity, one thing. And after the 2012 Olympics, he has spoken openly about the period that followed. A man at the absolute peak of human achievement in his field, who didn’t want to get out of bed. Who felt completely empty. When your entire identity is one thing, and that thing ends, or even pauses, what’s left?

This isn’t unique to athletes. It’s the CEO who reaches the exit and feels nothing. The entrepreneur who hits the number and realises they don’t know who they are without the chase. The person who spent a decade building something and wakes up one day to find their kids are teenagers they barely know.

Going all in has a cost. That cost is always paid by everything else. And when the thing you went all in for ends, and it always ends, you discover what you sacrificed to get there.

I Used to Think Differently

I want to be honest here, because I think it matters. In my twenties, I was all in. Not on one specific thing necessarily, but on the idea that striving harder, longer, and more intensely was always the answer. I measured people by what they were worth financially. I genuinely believed that a person’s financial success was a reasonable proxy for their value as a human being.

That couldn’t be further from the truth.

Travelling with my family changed me. Some of the richest human beings I have ever met, in terms of warmth, presence, generosity, contentment and humanity, have almost nothing financially. People who had figured out something that took me years to even start to grasp. That a full life isn’t a financial statement. That happiness isn’t a net worth.

At 25, you think you have all the answers. At 40, you realise you were asking the wrong questions.

The Diminishing Returns Nobody Talks About

Here’s something worth thinking about honestly. In almost any field, wealth, fitness, business, sport or anything else, the effort required to move from average to good is significant. The effort to move from good to excellent is more again. But the effort required to move from excellent to elite? That’s not a linear step up. It’s exponential. It costs an entirely different order of magnitude of time, sacrifice, and obsession.

And here’s the part that should give you pause: the gap in actual lived experience between excellent and elite is often surprisingly small. The person in the top 5% of wealth can live extraordinarily well. They can own their time, invest properly, travel, build genuine security, and never really worry about money in the way most people do. The person in the top 1% has more, but not more life. Not more hours in the day. Not necessarily more happiness, more presence, or more of the things that actually matter.

The cost of that final leap, from excellent to world-class, is almost always paid in the currency of everything else. More hours means less presence. More obsession means less bandwidth for relationships, health, experience. The marginal financial gain at the very top often buys you more of what you already have enough of, at a price that comes directly out of your life.

That’s the trade most people never sit down and calculate honestly.

What I’m Actually Chasing

I want to be clear: I still have enormous goals. I’m not sitting here telling you to take it easy. I have things I want to achieve in business, in my fitness, in travel, in time with the people I love. Dive trips I want to do with my dad before he gets too old. Marathon times I want to hit. Lifting goals. Calisthenics goals. Business milestones. The list goes on.

But the only way I can pursue all of them, the only way I get to have all of those things in my life concurrently, is by aiming for the top 5% in each, not the top 1% in one.

My pillars, the things I work on in this order, are:

1. Health and fitness, mentally and physically
2. Time with my family and a strong relationship with them
3. Business and financial success
4. Travel
5. Time for my own hobbies and interests

These aren’t competing priorities. They’re the whole picture. The whole point. When one of them collapses, the others suffer. Great bank balance but you haven’t seen your family properly in months? That isn’t success. Plenty of time but constant financial anxiety? That isn’t freedom. Perfect fitness but your relationships are empty? You’re missing something.

The Hidden Maths

Here’s the bit that took me a long time to fully appreciate.

If you aim for the top 5-10% across all your pillars, health, wealth, relationships, time, experience, you end up in the top 1% of life.

Think about that for a second. How many people do you know who have enough money to genuinely live on their terms, not rich beyond imagination, but free and are physically fit enough to keep up with someone fifteen or twenty years younger than them, and have a close and present relationship with their family, and get to travel the world, and have hobbies they actually love?

Not many. That combination of things is genuinely rare. And it doesn’t come from going all in on one of them. It comes from being deliberately excellent across all of them.

One of my genuinely happiest moments is walking in the woods after school pickup on a Tuesday afternoon with my son, the light through the trees, no rush. It’s a simple thing. But it’s only a happy thing because the business is running while I’m there. If I were walking in those woods with no income, with financial stress pressing in from every angle, it wouldn’t be peaceful. It would be anxiety dressed as nature. All the pillars have to hold for any single one of them to actually feel the way it’s supposed to feel.

Balance Is Not an Excuse

I want to address something directly, because I know how this gets misread.

When people hear the word ‘balance,’ a certain type of person uses it as permission to not try very hard. To not be ambitious. To accept mediocrity across the board and call it wisdom. That is absolutely not what I’m saying here.

Be ambitious. Chase ridiculous goals. Do the things they tell you that you can’t do. Work at it every single day. Train harder than you think you need to. Build something you’re proud of. Push.

Just do it across multiple arenas. Don’t let the world narrow you down to one thing and call it focus.

I once read that the happiest humans are those with the most things that make them happy. And that addiction, any addiction, is the narrowing of what makes a person happy. A fulfilled life runs in the opposite direction. Wide. Many things restore you. Many things matter. Many things bring you back to yourself on a hard day.

Guard that width deliberately. Because the world, social media, culture, hustle porn, the algorithm, will try constantly to narrow you into one thing and tell you that’s what champions look like.

The Exception

I’ll give the all-in crowd this: if your singular goal genuinely requires it, go in with open eyes.

If you want to be an Olympic athlete, yes, the goal demands total commitment. If you want to build a billion-dollar business, the statistics suggest you’ll need to sacrifice a lot of what others aren’t willing to sacrifice. Some goals genuinely require everything.

But go in knowing what you’re signing up for. Know that relationships will struggle. That friendships will thin out. That your identity will become completely fused with the outcome. And know what happens when that outcome arrives, or doesn’t, and you have to figure out who you are on the other side of it.

Success is a personal word. I’m not here to define it for anyone else. But I’d encourage you, honestly, to sit with what you’re actually chasing. And whether the life at the end of the all-in path is the one you actually want.

The Real Top 1%

In my opinion, its the person who has enough, truly enough, financially. Who is fit, strong, and healthy in ways that make them feel twenty years younger than their age. Who has a family that actually knows them, not just lives with them. Who has seen the world, done the things, made the memories. Who has hobbies that restore them and friendships that matter. Who can walk in the woods on a Tuesday afternoon and feel nothing but gratitude.

That person is genuinely rare. That combination is in the top 1% of lives lived.

And it doesn’t come from going all in. It comes from being intentional, ambitious, and excellent, across all of it.

That’s the goal I’m chasing. I hope it’s yours too.