Unexpected Pleasures.
Why did you become a business owner?
Sure, there are the obvious reasons: having freedom over your time, where you work, and being your own boss. There are also joys of just starting out in business, like getting a first check (and possibly crying because someone paid you real money for this thing you said you could do). Or the satisfaction of realizing you love your work again with a fierceness that you never expected when you were working a W2 job.
That said, the most surprising and unexpected pleasures of business ownership kick in and stack up (if your experience is like mine) once you’re a few years into your business. Yes, sometimes, it’s because you woke up excited about an idea. For me, in year six of my business, some of my most unexpected pleasures have been related to a next-level habit formation in my personal life.
I dug into habits a lot during the first year of my business, because I had to learn how to make myself work—and learning how to reshape my habits was an important part of that process. But as important as it was, my outcomes weren’t as far reaching as to affect every area of my life. In year one, yes, I got better about intentional exercise—once I realized there was a strong correlation between my mental health and how often I went for a run. But in year six, the habit gains kicked in for me in a curious way.
I had gained a fair bit of weight through COVID and wanted to drop from my all-time high of 183 pounds back to around 160 pounds—a good, strong, healthy weight for me. As anyone who has tried to lose 20+ pounds might know, it’s not as simple as it looks. I had never tried losing weight before (not seriously at least) and when I first I tried it in year five of my business, I had zero success. In year six, I realized the reason I couldn’t move the needle was because I wasn’t doing a deep enough change to my lifestyle. As I had been working on my mental health in therapy for 18 months, I started to realize how alcohol had functioned as an unhealthy coping mechanism and escape for me during most of the first two years of the pandemic. I had been drinking 2-3 drinks a day, every day. What functioned as a rhythm for winding down at the end of the workday (or to have fun on the weekend) turned into an issue as I became aware of how it was disrupting my sleep, giving me mood swings, making my weight management more difficult, and functioning as an empty filler in my diet. In short, it didn’t make my life any better. Worse, I was having trouble stopping.
What started in 2020 as failing to limit myself to 10 drinks a week and wishing without success that I could keep to five, became in 2022, finding substitutes and solutions. I realized that when I was tired at the end of my workday around 5 PM and my willpower was low, I’d be looking from relief from my anxiety that would flood back after my work was done and a beer or a cocktail would be my fix. This went on for a long time, until I started to experiment. After learning on TikTok that something cold (like an ice pack on my wrists) could reduce anxiety, I forced myself to drink a refrigerated seltzer water before picking up my first alcoholic drink. Over time, I realized I didn’t need the carbonation either, and I just started refrigerating water in Mason jars so that I could grab a cold glass and drink it at any point. This, of course, had the added benefit of hydration. As I continued to work on my sources of anxiety in therapy, I was also able to start setting more aggressive limits for my drinking. I experimented with only having three drinks a week, which was tricky because of how much the networking events I attend and the social engagements I have involve alcohol. I remember complaining to a friend that I wasn’t using my drink ticket. Then, after hitting only three drinks in a week, I went down to two (albeit heavy pours)…then one. When I was active in my parkour training in New York City, a rule of thumb we adopted was that any movement you could do three times in a row was something you had mastered. So, I aimed to have only one drink three weeks in a row. Today, I’m at that one drink a week—if any—but more importantly, I have a sense of full control over my decision to drink or not to drink going forward.
What a road to get here. If I hadn’t learned about the importance of self-mastery and the need for a deep, sustained lifestyle change in my habit formation, I couldn’t have done it.
Why does running a business require you to get your personal life in tip-top shape? As any business owner knows, you get out of a business what you put into it. To put more of your personal energy into your business, you must have that energy to invest. One of the biggest untapped areas of potential energy is in your personal life—your rest regimen, how you fuel your body, what you do to manage your feelings, and more. So, most business owners figure out before too long that they must make significant personal life adjustments to get their business to move in the direction they want to move it.
And getting your personal life in order and seeing your business grow as a result is a satisfying, if not unexpected pleasure.
Do you have a story about this? I’d like to hear from you!
