Martha Stewart Calls Work-Life Balance a Myth, Still Starts at 7 A.M.

By Grace Kim

Martha Stewart, 85, runs an empire worth an estimated $400 million—and she says the idea that you can build one while keeping work and life in harmony is a fantasy.

"There is no such thing as balance—just get that through your thick skulls," Stewart said earlier this month in a conversation with Vivian Tu, the finance influencer behind the social media account Your Rich BFF. "You can't balance it. It doesn't balance."

Stewart's career has spanned Wall Street, television, modeling studios and even federal prison. The lifestyle mogul believes major life events—marriage, divorce—inevitably knock any equilibrium off course. She conceded that a few people might occasionally strike balance. She isn't buying it as the norm.

"This thing about balance, I don't know who thought about that—but it just doesn't work," she said. "Maybe infrequently—and I'm jealous of those people—but they're also boring."

What does her workday actually look like?

Stewart wakes up at 4 a.m. She reads the entire New York Times. Then she heads to Pilates or a session with her personal trainer. By 7 a.m., she's at work—on projects ranging from her lifestyle brand to an AI startup—and she expects her staff to be working too.

Even at 85, she shows little sign of slowing down. That pace underpins her argument: a $400 million empire, in her telling, isn't built on balance.

How did she rebuild after prison?

Stewart served five months in federal prison for crimes related to an investigation into a stock sale. Since her release in 2005, she has staged a major comeback, rebuilding her public profile and expanding her brands.

Part of that comeback, she says, is refusing boredom. She brushed off describing her career as a series of "pivots"—she said she "hate[s] the word pivot." She prefers to frame her journey as a series of metamorphoses, an idea inspired by author Franz Kafka.

"Why be bored?" Stewart said. "If you even feel a moment of boredom or you can't get up for some reason—because you don't want to face the day—that is not good."

When something stops exciting her, she finds something new to pursue rather than resigning herself to boredom.

"When I get up in the morning, I have choices," Stewart said. "I can do whatever right now I can do anything I want to do every day but I like being able to look forward to what's going to happen in the day, and the surprises are also good."

Her affinity for freedom carries weight given that she has lived with it restricted. The takeaway in plain words: Stewart treats each day's unpredictability as fuel, not a problem to solve.

Who else rejects the balance ideal?

Work-life balance remains a top priority for many aspiring young professionals—Fortune has reported it now outranks pay as a job perk. But Stewart has prominent company in calling the ideal unrealistic.

TIAA President and CEO Thasunda Brown Duckett made a similar case on Fortune's Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast earlier this year.

"Work-life balance is a lie. It never reconciles…so get rid of that," Duckett told Fortune's Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell.

Duckett's realization came during her years at JPMorgan Chase, where she rose to CEO of Chase Consumer Banking. Long workdays and commutes left her struggling to make time for family, feeling she was falling short everywhere.

"I was feeling like I was failing my husband, I was failing my children, I was failing my mom, my dad, my brothers, everyone," she said. "I was just not winning, and I needed a win."

Her answer: stop forcing every part of life to fit neatly. Some periods demand more attention at work; others allow more focus on family. Accept the swings.

Former President Barack Obama has made the same argument—that excellence requires periods of imbalance.

"If you want to be excellent at anything—sports, music, business, politics—there's going to be times of your life when you're out of balance, where you're just working and you're single-minded," Obama said last year on The Pivot Podcast.

The common thread: a CEO, a former president and an 85-year-old mogul who still clocks in by 7 a.m. all treat imbalance not as a failure to manage, but as the price of building something big.