Inside the Office
While chatting with a neighbor the other day, I casually mentioned how excited I was for Fall Break.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “I thought you loved your job.”
“Ummm… I do.”
“Then why are you so excited about not having to do it?”
Obviously, he was teasing me. But he also had a point. I spend lots of time telling people how much I love teaching, how amazing my students are, and how fortunate I am to have a job that lets me spend my days doing what I enjoy. So why was I celebrating the precious hours I wouldn’t have to be in class?
For a moment, I was feeling a little guilty. Maybe I was being hypocritical? After all, if I really loved my job as much as I claimed, wouldn’t I be disappointed about the breaks? Maybe I’m supposed to be pacing my empty classroom during Fall Break, staring wistfully at the empty desks,and counting the minutes until my students return?
OK… that’s a bit much. But hopefully you get my point. How could I love my work and be excited not to have any?
On one hand, it shouldn’t be possible. If someone genuinely loves their work, they shouldn’t be able to pull themselves away from it. On the other hand, the issue could actually be the same one I used to struggle with when I was building startups.
Early in my entrepreneurial journey, my inability to stop working was the kind of thing I’d wear like a badge of honor. Nights… weekends… holidays, I always had another email to send or feature to code or networking event to attend. As a result, if I wasn’t working I felt like I was falling behind. Worse, I worried that wanting time away from my startup somehow meant I wasn’t passionate enough about it.
But looking back, I realize I was being ridiculous. After all, nobody assumes a professional athlete doesn’t love their sport because they take a day off from training. If anything, we understand how rest is an essential part of athletic performance. Muscles need time to recover and bodies need sleep and training without recovery is more likely to produces injured athletes than strong one.
Yet somehow, in the entrepreneurial world, we’ve convinced ourselves constant work is the ideal approach to success. We celebrate people who answer emails at midnight and we admire entrepreneurs who work through vacations. I bet sleeping under your desk can get you a promotion in some companies.
Sure, sometimes work does require extra efforts. Maybe you have a big deadline. Or maybe there’s a big crisis. But extraordinary effort is, by definition, beyond the level of “ordinary.”
And none of this means working hard is bad or I’m not going to get done whatever needs doing. It’s more a reminder that our brains need time away from difficult problems in order to do stuff like process information, make connections, and recover the mental energy required for sustained attention. Plus, our bodies need sleep, and even our relationships need time to be nurtured and supported.
By the way, I suspect people who legitimately love their work need this message more than anyone else (which, in part, is why I’m sharing it with a bunch of entreprenuers). When you love your work, convincing yourself to work more than your body can (or should) is easy. But that only lasts for so long. Eventually, your body’s exhaustion overtakes its ambition, and that’s when the real problems begin.
-Aaron
Worth Your Time
Recently, I’ve been working on getting blurbs for a book I’ve got coming out in the Spring. As part of that, I’ve had to find other authors whose writing resonates with my own.
In that process, I stumbled across a book I haven’t thought of in a while. It’s by Daniel Pink and it’s called To Sell Is Human.
As the title suggests, it’s a book about helping people get comfortable with selling. And Pink wrote it because, for whatever reasons (or rather, for reasons Pink more appropriately articulates in his book than I’m able to do here), humans tend to feel selfconscious about it.
I used to feel that way. Heck, I still do. But I’ve gotten a lot better, and one of the things that’s helped me take that step was Pink’s book. I wanted to pass it along to all of you, as well, since I suspect I’m not the only one with that particular issue.