Pacing ourselves

while still leaving room to grow

Last weekend I was chatting to a friend. We both have our own businesses, but whereas mine is very new, and barely off the ground, his is a few years in and at that point where he’s having to think quite carefully about how he takes it forward. Whereas until now he’s needed to say yes to all the work, whether he likes the customer and job or not, he’s now got too much work to manage so he needs to think about how he makes it sustainable and enjoyable for the long term.

An important thing to note at this point, is that his is a gardening business. I was asking what direction he was thinking he might want to go into. His answer was that he prefers the work where he can see a difference – not necessarily wholesale garden design, but where he’s created something new, or changed something identifiable. Basically, he said, he doesn’t just want to mow lawns all the time, as you can never see where you’ve been, and they just need redoing again next week.

Now as soon as he said this, I suggested that maybe some lawn mowing was necessary. Don’t we all need some part of our job we can do on autopilot which doesn’t require much brain?

But over the course of this week, I’ve been thinking about it, and I’m not sure I was right. I think I’m just thinking through the lens of where I currently am, which is a bit stretched and trying to do lots of things that are new to me. At the moment, nothing is like mowing a lawn to me, it’s all having to imagine new gardens every day.

Mulling it over, I began to wonder if I’m experiencing a phenomenon that I’ve seen in work colleagues and clients over the years. They make an assumption that just because something is a higher grade, that it’ll always be more tiring, more taxing, and completely incompatible with other commitments they have. And yes, at a certain point that’s probably true, there will be super high powered greedy jobs that do expect you to give you absolute all. But that’s not all jobs. And it's certainly not the middling grade jobs a step or two above them these colleagues were thinking about.

They were making an error in thinking that more money means you are obliged to spend more time and energy, when often I’ve found this is the opposite of the case. Often being a bit higher up gives you more autonomy, more control, and more clout to say no to things you don’t like doing. Things at any level can feel like having to design a new garden every day if you’re not used to it. But once you’ve been in post a while, even things that took a lot of effort the first time begin to feel like mowing a lawn. If they didn’t, nobody would be able to sustain working in higher paid jobs over the long term.

There isn’t much conclusion to this. But I’ve found it a useful way to think of things over the last week. What in my work is like mowing a lawn every week? What do I need to become more like mowing a lawn or better still, pulling the odd weed every few weeks? And what am I avoiding which might actually bring me more energy and joy - like seeing a new garden flourish and thrive?