I worked for my previous employer for 23 years. I lived in the throes of FOMO (fear of missing out), every single day followed a powerful and amazing horrible cycle - no matter how free the day may seem at the beginning, it would fill up by 10 am, and overflow by the afternoon, and find me exhausted by the evening! I said this, pointed this out to my lovely wife over and over, "it's amazing how the day fills up with work work work." That was because I did not know what I should be doing, the one or two absolutely necessary things that I love and can make the best contributions with, and consequently everyone else prioritized my life for me. Every. Day. For. Decades.
Now I have a different challenge, a different experience. Now that I and I alone am prioritizing my life, there is actually space, margin, limits, boundaries, time in my life to do????? Yes, I actually come to a place many days now (every successful day) where I find myself with nothing to DO!! Does this mean I am no longer important? Does this mean that my work load is not heavy enough? Does this mean that I am gonna be bored for the first time since I was a teenager??? No, no and no. However, what it does mean is that I am doing only the right stuff for only the right reasons. It means that I can watch hockey three nights a week. It means I can take my wife out for dinner and not feel like I should still be grinding away at the computer. It means I can leave my phone at home in the evenings and turn it completely off every night. It means I am living exactly in the sweet spot of doing only the significant and meaningful work that I am best suited for, and that I can do better than almost anyone, and I am not chasing endless pointless activity in the name of progress or forward movement.
It means I can enjoy my cigar while watching the moon rising in the east, with a glass of excellent something, with no other pressing matters to be accomplished today. It means that I am free from endless meetings where I have no contribution to make, no reason to be there, and am free to not be there! It means I can call my parents more often, talk longer. Ditto for the kids! It means I can "be here now" and not mentally somewhere else. It is an astonishing experience of freedom, a chance to be still, and not frenetically pushing to the next whatever, because you finished today's super important work, and that is all the work you should be doing.
As this beautiful Seth Godin blog said today,
"Change is the point. It's what we seek to do to the world around us.
Change, actual change, is hard work. And changing our own minds is the most difficult place to start.
It's also the only place to start.
It's hard to find the leverage to change the way you see the world, hard to pull on your thoughtstraps. But it's urgent."
"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices..." William James
