Work & creation
The business is working. So why aren't you?
1 min read
“What if the business is working, but the life around it isn't?”
There is a moment most founders can identify afterwards but miss at the time — when the company stops being something you make decisions about and becomes the thing that makes decisions about you.
Where you live. Who you see. What kind of person you are at dinner. How much of your attention any human being gets.
It happens through reasonable steps
Nobody chooses this. It arrives as a sequence of defensible short-term decisions, each one temporary, none of which are ever revisited. The busy quarter that became the operating model. The hire you postponed for one more year, twice.
The business is not the problem
Which is why fixing the business rarely fixes this. Revenue goes up; the life does not improve. Another round, another hire, and somehow the calendar looks identical.
The actual question is what you are allowed to want alongside it. Many people running successful companies have never once stated, out loud, what their life should look like — while stating quarterly targets with total precision.
Write the life down with the same specificity you give the business plan. It is startling how much becomes negotiable once it exists as a requirement rather than a hope.
If you are at the point where you don’t need another article, you need someone to think through the situation with you. That is the work I do.