Eat Sleep Drink Dream — A Year of Taking Work Less Seriously
I don’t often write about personal things here, but the two most-read posts of this past year were Mastering The Rudiments, about my journey with learning the drums, and Unretirement, a personal reflection on my career.
I wrote both of those back in May — a shoulder month between seasons. In May, the year hasn’t hardened into disappointment or routine, there’s still time to change course. Now that the year has passed, I’ve found myself wanting to Think Out Loud a bit, in particular about a goal I set for myself this year. In “Unretirement” I explained that after seven companies, I had decided to get off the startup train for good: “As any founder can tell you, being in charge of millions of dollars of invested capital and scores of trusting employees is exhausting.” What I didn’t mention was that I promised myself I’d not commit to anything full time — no new startup, to be sure, but also, no project of any kind that would dominate my time and warp reality in its wake. My goal was to simply…be.
Twelve months in, I find myself wondering: How’d that go? And, what, if anything, has changed?
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I’ve been doing basically one thing for 35 years — starting companies. And even as I did that, I was manically spackling in projects like writing books, joining boards…
