One of many great things I’ve learnt from my friend and podcast cohost Christian Genco is this powerful framing:

Humans thrive when they have one foot in order and one foot in chaos.

A balance between stability and novelty.

It can be easy to fall too far one way or the other when we’re building a business. And we can end up in a dark place.

The cool thing I’ve discovered is that as long as you recognise you’ve temporarily shifted too far one way, you can pull yourself back—and the thing you use to pull yourself back doesn’t have to be anything to do with work.

I had a period recently where I said you know what, the next few weeks, the business is going to be boring. There are monotonous tasks, but they need to be done. And so I am putting non-negotiable time in my calendar to learn how to wakeboard. A new thing, where I had no idea what I was doing, but would satisfy my need for creative exploration, learning, chaos, while the business went through a few monotonous weeks¹. I knew I would need that. And it helped tremendously.

1. The specifics will be different for different people: someone else might feel energised by that same business task I found draining. It’s about understanding yourself, your own needs, your own personality, and finding things to fill your life that line up with that. ↩