Urgency is scarcity
“You could have done so much more if you only had time/And when my time is up, have I done enough?”
- Eliza in “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story” from Hamilton
(Image by Pexels)
It’s been ten months since I closed the Little Middle School, and I’m still not sure exactly what I’m going to do next.
That’s okay, right? Yeah, I think it’s okay.
I’m paying my bills. I’m enjoying my day-to-day work. I’m making new friends.
I could choose to believe that every day I spend not building the next thing is a day that I’m losing out on the benefit of it.
But I don’t think that’s helpful. That’s an attitude based on seeing resources as scarce. I prefer to believe that there is plenty to go around.
True, time is ticking by, and it is finite (at least, as far as my small human mind can understand). There will come a day when I can no longer do the activities I’m doing now, either because I’m incapacitated or dead.
But who am I to say that I should have spent my days differently? What gives me the authority to say that there’s a correct timeline or that one path is better than another?
Whatever I create will have opportunity cost associated with it. Investing my resources in one area means that there is less to invest elsewhere. Single-minded attention to a specific outcome may deliver that outcome more quickly, but I might not be willing to make the trade-off to allow that to happen.
I remember the days of trying to follow Dave Ramsey’s plan for becoming debt free. He advocates for a single-minded focus, a “gazelle intensity” until you are debt free with an emergency fund of at least three months of expenses.
I tried it, and I struggled. The discomfort of being in debt became my whole world, and it backfired — I became so mired in a sense of lack that I kept making stupid financial decisions to make the pain go away.
When I shifted my mindset to have a morally neutral attitude toward debt, I started to have more financial success. I used credit card points to go on a trip to Europe, and another, and another. Debt became a tool, and eventually one that I didn’t need to use as much.
Similarly, even though I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to do next, I’m not sitting around. I’m not desperate to figure it out. I’m not making pros-and-cons lists. I’m doing a whole bunch of different things and learning from the process. That is way better than the way I fretted about it when I felt a sense of urgency about my future business, with only a feeling of being stuck as my reward.
Ironically, I would say that I’m making faster progress now than I did when I was in a hurry.
Looking back, the mentors who tried to get me moving along were doing what they thought was right. Peggy says to Joan in Mad Men, “I just realized something — you think you’re being helpful.” But the two of them have such different values that Joan can’t be helpful.
I didn’t fully understand my own values way back when, so I piggybacked on those of others (and even paid money for the privilege). Naturally, it didn’t get me anywhere. Now, I see that the time pressure just led me more quickly into something that wasn’t right for me.
This story is incomplete. I can’t give you the final, triumphant chapter, in which trusting my own instincts and taking my time brought incredible success. But in a way, that’s my whole point. I don’t need that final chapter to feel fulfilled. I’m good with how things are right now. I’m enjoying my life. I am not done growing and learning, but I’m content with what I have.
It will be fun to do something new. But I’m not depending on that for my happiness or sense of self. I’m in no rush, and that’s the way I like it. I may not have everything I could ever want, but I have everything I need.
