Do what you want
Owls always do exactly what they feel like doing. (Image by Erik Karits)
I had a client who really didn’t like to work very much.
Each day, she would sleep in, then spend a leisurely morning writing in her journal, doing yoga, and visiting with her roommate over breakfast.
After a walk, she was ready to settle down to work most days. Then, after a few hours, she would be ready for a nap.
By late afternoon, it was time for social interaction. She lived in a beautiful city with fabulous weather and always had an invitation to go do something fun, so that’s exactly what she did. Can you blame her?
Even though this client had asked me to help her establish her business, it was not clear to me that this matched what she actually wanted out of life. If you keep getting distracted from what you’re doing, maybe the distractions aren’t the problem; maybe it’s what you’re doing.
I started to wonder whether it would make more sense for this client to quit trying to launch her business and just live the life she seemed to want to live.
Maybe she could get a part-time job. It would probably require less self-discipline to work for someone else.
It’s not that it requires so much self-discipline to be a business owner. It requires self-discipline to do things you don’t want to do. To swim against the current of your own life.
As someone who has been self-employed for pretty much my whole career, I don’t think I necessarily have more self-discipline than average. Mostly, I get by with intrinsic motivation. I enjoy doing the things I have to do — or at least, I am well enough in tune with the results that I strongly associate them with the actions that lead to those results. Thus, I’m doing the things I want to do even if they are things that I have to do.
Anyone who spends long periods doing things they don’t want to do is headed toward burnout. Better to find a way to do what you want.
Of course, if we have it in our minds that there is something more heroic or virtuous about being a business owner, we will resist the idea that it is not the ideal path for us.
Meanwhile, we might make matters worse by stacking our existing business with a bunch of tasks and projects that we think we should be doing even if they aren’t really up our alley.
We can resolve these demoralizing situations by looking at our work without judgment. If we make space for what we want, not just what we think will look good to someone else or what someone else told us to do, we have a chance to get into something that we enjoy. That’s likely to yield better results and a more pleasant experience along the way.
There have been times in my life when I did what I thought I should do — the equivalent of eating so-called healthy food instead of junk food. But looking back, I was really just eating food I didn’t like, not necessarily healthier food. Oops! Correcting this tendency is an ongoing process, and it helps me find incrementally more joy as I go along.
I’m not the one who can give you permission to do what you want. That’s you. But I’ll suggest it anyway, in case it helps: Do what you want, without apology, and build the rest of your life around that. It won’t always be an easy path, but it will be the most sustainable one in the long run.
