Entrepreneurial Sin #2: Postponing Joy

I met with a mentor of mine who founded a firm 20 years ago, and is now enjoying the fruits of her prodigious labor as a chairman, but no longer a manager, of her company.

"I'm making up for it now in my 50s," she said. But I wish I'd done things differently. My company almost ended my marriage and permanently affected my relationship with my daughter."

She'd started her business with a young child in tow. Twenty years later, she was still working on revitalizing the relationships that fell to the wayside. She was also making up for the physical damage of years of no exercise and unwholesome eating--she never had time to prepare meals or take care of herself.

Now, many pounds leaner and with ample free time to travel and take classes, she seems younger than me, certainly lighter physically and mentally.

I had to ask her, "What can I do now to prevent that from happening? How do I achieve more balance?"

She sat there silently, thoughtfully, for a while, and then said matter-of-factly, "Oh you won't acheive balance for a while. Years probably. I don't really know. I'm sure awareness helps."

I read with fascination profiles in Inc. Magazine, stories of people who are enjoying the benefits of entrepreneurship. I read Keith Hammonds' "Balance is Bunk" article in Fast Company, which made the case for the overachieving set: If you love what you do, who cares about having dinner every night at 6pm? I nodded in agreement, rather aggressively. We're not hungry for BALANCE, I thought. We're hungry for MEANING.

But then I got married.

I spoke recently to the woman who presided over my wedding ceremony, my very close compadre, Elisabeth, whom I describe to others as "my spiritual friend." Somehow that description is meant to explain why I need to have her around. A defining characteristic of Elisabeth is that, though we have no business connection whatsoever, I will move heaven and earth in order to get on her calendar. There's something I get out of talking with Elisabeth--more energy, more perspective. And strangely, the effects transfer over into my business life.

We hadn't spoken significantly since my wedding. But she called recently to share some news and to see how marriage was setting in.

"I'm good," I said. "We're good. I just wish there were more time to be married."

It seems that I've placed my husband in that "Important but not urgent" quadrant that we overly anal types tend to put things in, in order to properly prioritize. Granted this system was established for business priorities only, but for people like me who have to schedule eating into our Treos it's a perfectly good system for everything.

"Are you OK with that?" Elisabeth asked.

"Not really. It's not ideal; it's just the way it has to be right now."

I'd read the articles, spoken with mentors, and all of them indicated the same thing: there is no shortcutting the personal sacrificing in an entrepreneurial life. "At some point," I said. "I'll make the time."

The thing that I love about Elisabeth is that she's been involved with personal development long enough that certain catchphrases don't cause her to immediately start coaching me. I expected her to begin a rant about making time for my life, but she didn't. She took the higher road.

"You know, you've always been committed to helping people. I'll bet this struggle that you are having now would be a useful thing to share."

I balked of course, saying that sharing took precious time away from working, but I could actually see my BS for what it was, as it emanated into the phone receiver. Elisabeth, the unbelievably unjudgmental, knew just what to say:

"Sometimes the last thing that someone as busy as you would think about is talking things out, or getting support. But talking creates energy around things. Why don't we find time to talk more often? In the end, putting energy around the outcomes will actually create the space for them to happen."

For a spiritual coach, Elisabeth sure knew a lot about bottom-line results. She had tied our conversations into ROI, and thus gave me permission to go for it.

"You mean, you would coach me?"

"Coach? No. I'm your friend. I mean let's check-in, say, once a week.

Our first session was a week and a half ago. I felt a twinge of guilt for keeping that time slot open. So many emails could be sent or read in this chunk of time. I thought, I'll have to make up for this later. I wondered if the call was supposed to be like therapy, and I would just start going over my week and any moments that spurred any unusual thoughts or emotions.

"Where should I start?" I said.

"Anywhere, Sweetie. We're friends, so just start like you normally would, and I'll just listen."

I started much the same way I do a blog, by barfing out seemingly unrelated events that struck me somehow, and then trying to tie them together with a thread of commonality. I mentioned my dinner with Andy Lark, and our interesting conversation about spending time with family. I mentioned a conversation I'd had months ago with one of my business partners, Elisa Camahort, in which she told me she worried about me sometimes because I had no internal mechanism for shutting off work. Now that I was married, I was starting to find that I had a limit, though it was crusted over like a fossil and still very hard to make out. I mentioned that my mother-in-law had sent me books about being a child of an alcholic--something that I thought I'd reconciled before my father died. But dammit, these books! They say "Adult Children," as they are called, are, in essence, fairly farked in life: We don't know what normal is; we don't know boundaries, we think we know what everyone around us is thinking and making the necessary adjustments, but we have no idea what we really want.

"I thought I knew myself," I told Elisabeth.

"All of this is perfect," she said. "What I'm curious to know more about is not why you work so much, but why you seem so bent on postponing joy."

Those words, "Postponing Joy," hit me in the stomach. How funny those words were together. "Joy" was an interesting word in itself; it's my Mom's name for one--someone who has never had ANY problem living in the moment. If anything, my mother needed to get off the train of the present and start thinking about her future--or so I thought. My whole family had a penchant for enjoying themselves and, I felt, not seeing the big picture. Joy, to me, didn't feel good, it felt like denial of the truth. It was something that wasn't deserved.

"Think about times in your life when you've postponed joy," Elisabeth said. At that question I let out a quick, gutteral laugh. I lived to postpone joy. Then I thought of pizza.

Yes pizza. As a kid my parents often ordered pizza for delivery. We weren't the healthiest eaters, but I'm sure we weren't the least healthy, either. In any event, we often had pizza for dinner. Mom usually ordered a sausage pizza and then a pizza with lots of random things on it--green peppers, black olives, hamburger on special occasions. Back then, hamburger on pizza was exotic.

All three of my siblings--with the exception of my brother, who was too young--ate their slices normally, except for me. I knew that I liked the toppings the best, then the cheese second,and the crust last. But I was also somehow compelled to eat the whole slice. It seemed the right thing to do.

So I organized my slice, ripping off the crust, ripping off the cheese, picking off the individual toppings and placing each into piles, and then eating the pizza from least desirable item to most. I did the same thing with granola bars with chocolate chips, or cereal with dehydrated marshmallows, or assorted nuts: separated the item into its elements, and then eating from least desirable to most. My brother--the little shit--took the easy road, eating his favorite parts first and leaving the rest. He picked out the marshmallows in his Lucky Charms, for example, and left the rest of the bland cereal untouched. But I never left things untouched. It seemed unfair to pick out all of the rare Brazil nuts and pecans and then leave the poor, ubiquitous peanuts for everyone else. More to the point, I wasn't supposed to enjoy the best without deserving it somehow, without stomaching the less desirable.

I'd forgotten about that tendency sometime in adulthood. Picking apart one's food isn't acceptable during business lunches. But the tendency is still there on other levels. I often wear the clothes I like most the least, waiting for the right occasion to merit a favorite outfit. I save the parts of my day that I enjoy the most for the end of it, when I'm too tired. I save my marriage for when my business life gets to a level that I feel comfortable enough to allow myself to enjoy it. I save happiness for a time when I have "deserved" it.

"I don't think I need to tell you how to work less," Elisabeth said. I just need to remind you of something: You deserve to be happy."

"I know that. And I will be ... I am."

"You just need to remember that, OK. That's your assignment. When you do something ask yourself, is this making me happy? Don't worry right now if it's not. Just be aware of whether or not it is."

I felt groggy for the rest of the day. And voraciously hungry. I met with friends for dinner that night and was strangely quiet. I didn't have much to talk about; for once it seemed that everyone else had much more to say. The next morning I was still hungry and, as seems to always be the case lately, there was nothing left to eat in the house. Just a jar of mixed nuts.

I poured a few out and sorted them out, as I tend to do, least to most desirable. Never enough pecans or Brazil nuts, I thought. But regardless I ate my favorites first. If I'm really hungry, I'll eat the other ones later. Or maybe I won't because I let myself have what I really wanted first.

   

entrepreneurism career time management meaningful work

Comments

[ally]

Jory,
I loved this entry -- as always, I appreciate your honesty and admire you very much. Elisabeth is a shining light.

Check out http://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/practices/ Select Play or Being Present. It's a lovely resource.

Merry xmas to you and yours,

Al

[ally]

“Kabir tells us to jump, to break the ropes, to plunge into the truth. This is all you can do when you have come to the end of your rope, to the end of your strategies, and don’t know what else to do. It is a surrender, a falling in, not an act or initiative, but a willing acquiescence to what is so and has always been so.” Just read this and thought of you. Al

[Brian Keith]

Here stands the power of sharing- that those at one stage of life can inform those at an earlier stage of life.

Hot damn, can you write.

Thank you.

-B

[Miffy]

Such Joy!
Thank you for taking the time away from many "other" things to share this.

[Debbie Call]

Jody, you are one of the bravest people I know. You have no idea how your outpouring helps all of us so much. Is there anyone out there who isn't guilty of postponing what really matters?

The time you took to write this blog post will have a much more profound and lasting effect on more people than the time you would have spent responding to emails.

You rock!

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