The hardest part of the last year hasn’t been the work. It’s been learning to balance the work against everything else.
For a long time I carried a corporate mentality into running a business, and it quietly worked against me. I was used to having someone tell me what to do and when to stop. There was a leave quota, so taking a break was a decision the system made easy. There were mental health and wellness programs. There were colleagues who looked out for each other. There were team dinners where bosses kept morale up, and performance appraisals to check that everyone was still motivated.
None of that exists when the business is yours. In fact it inverts. Customers, suppliers, teammates, employees, they all want a piece of you, because you’re the boss. The buck stops with you. Every decision, every responsibility, every outcome rests on your shoulders at the end of the day. And none of that lightens your responsibilities to your family and friends.
I found myself putting work above everything else without noticing it was eating into my personal life. In corporate life there were peak seasons and low seasons, natural breaks between projects and travel schedules that forced a pause. Running your own business, it’s a perpetual project. It never ends, and the list of things to do is effectively infinite.
A finite mentality in an infinite game
It’s the distinction from Finite and Infinite Games. A career felt like a finite game: each round had an objective, a set of resources, and you went at it until it was done. Business is the infinite game, where the point of playing is to keep playing.
That’s the heart of this reflection. I’ve had to accept how important it is to take care of my mind, body, and spirit, and to build the mechanisms for that myself. In a job those mechanisms came included. Out here I have to construct every one of them from scratch, the guardrails I never had to think about before.
Staying in the game
The measure isn’t a six-monthly or yearly appraisal anymore. It’s how long I can stay in the game, because the rewards of staying in are the whole point. Exponential growth and success only show up after repeated tries and enough time in the market.
I’m confident in my abilities. The biggest risk isn’t that I’m not good enough. It’s burning out and torching my health, my relationships, and my own motivation along the way. Going too fast and failing too hard to pick myself back up.
So the skill I’m building now isn’t a harder push. It’s learning to pace one that never ends.