Why success sometimes means plateauing
Reassessing your priorities to remind yourself why you’re doing this
I have never been financially driven. Don’t get me wrong, I recognise that being rich would make life a lot easier, but I’ve never cared about making money enough to devote my entire career to it. Some people do and I respect those people so much — making being rich your only aim in life and relentlessly pursuing that without letting anything else push you off-course must make life quite simple. One goal, crush everything that gets in the way.
For me, it’s a lot more complicated. I want money, but I also want to be able to do everything on my own terms and in my own time. Which means I won’t sell my soul in order to make big bucks — not because I’m on my high horse about morals, but because I’m simply too selfish to work to someone else’s timeline. I imagine part of it is my personality, part of it is a priority of the short-term gain (take this afternoon off to go swimming with my mates) over the long-term plan (work every day all day for the next 5 years and retire when I’m 35).
For example, it’s 2.15pm on a Thursday and I’ve honestly done no work today other than send 2 emails and write this introduction for an article I probably will never get round to finishing. Most people would be horrified at my behaviour — my parents certainly would be — but I am quite happy with this. Proud, even. Why? Because it shows I’ve got to a point where I can pay my rent, buy the food I need, spend small amounts of money on simple pleasures, save up over the year for a nice holiday and I don’t need to put more hours in than I currently do. But the best bit? I can do what I want, whenever I want. My pace of life is beautiful. It’s leisurely. The assets I have may not be luxurious, but the time I have is.
This is why, about a year ago, my best friend and business partner (Mae) and I changed our priorities completely. We’d just had a huge fight about a project we’d been pitching for. We’d barely spoken for weeks, even though we were the only two in the company we run. One-line emails and passive aggressive slack messages had been our only form of contact and the pressure cooker had been building. We had both (reluctantly) decided at the beginning of the project that, due to various heated disagreements we’d been having about the different approaches we were taking, Mae was going to do the project by herself and I would do everything else we were working on (for clarification, Mae probably had the bigger workload). By dividing the work like this, we had also inadvertently reduced contact between each other to the bare minimum, which meant that the resentment between us both was building steadily. The email had just come through confirming we had lost the pitch (which Mae had done a fantastic job of by the way) to another company. She got the news and rang me as I was driving back from Manchester. It all came tumbling out of both of us — the anger, resentment, disappointment, worry, sadness… it sounds like a huge amount of emotion for a single project, but Mae and I have also been best friends since were 8 years old so some of the emotions were tied to a 20-year long friendship as well as to the business arrangement. It was a lot. But it was a breakthrough.
After talking it out for hours on the phone — almost my whole drive from Manchester to Oxfordshire — we finally reached a moment of clarity.
“Have you noticed that we’ve been taking ourselves so seriously?”
“Oh my god, you’re right. We used to have so much fun working together and it was all a bit of a joke. When did we start being so serious??”
“I know right! How have we lost sight of the fact that we are in the dream position — two best friends working together on a business that allows them to enjoy themselves and also pays all the bills!”
“When did we forget how fun this is supposed to be?”
And that was it. The instant back-to-earth moment we needed. Who cares if we didn’t win the pitch — the ability to share the highs and lows of these moments with your best friend should be the only focus. That’s the reason to work. To be able to enjoy yourself. To be able to reassure each other when things are tricky and end up giggling instead of being sad. To be able to say to the other ‘you know what, shall we just go for a coffee and a walk instead this afternoon?’ And be met with the response ‘yes please, I wasn’t doing any work anyway’. To be able to call up your business partner on a Monday morning and ask them how their weekend was and ACTUALLY give a shit about the response rather than just be dreading the impending small talk from someone you barely know. To know that being able to enjoy work and share it with someone you care about is far more important than stressing about scaling a business or making millions of pounds.
So that’s where we are. Making small money but enjoying every second. The highs are more incredible than ever and the lows aren’t really that low. Because we have each other and we have all the freedom we could ever need.
After all, it really is the journey that you’ll remember at the end of the day.
