Sahil Bloom tweeted this out a few days ago:
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And it really resonated with me. I'm sure it does with a lot of you as well. I'm guilty of feeling this guilt. Because by definition, if you have a strong desire to do or to achieve something, then you're going to want to spend a lot time working toward it. And any time not spent working toward it, can feel like an unnecessary slowdown or delay.
But it's easy to let time melt away when you're in this headspace and I'm trying to be better at not letting this happen. For one thing, there are diminishing returns to work. We all need free time and rest. It makes us better at everything else we do in life.
It's also really easy to fill our lives with unnecessary bullshit. The same thing happens in our homes when we're not paying attention: we end up collecting unnecessary stuff. So as Paul Graham argues in this 2016 essay called "Life Is Short", it's important to "relentlessly prune bullshit." Focus on the things that matter, and don't wait.
When you're ambitious, I think it's easy to become focused on the future. I've been told I do this too much. Achieving something usually requires hard work and determination, and that likely means it won't happen today; it'll happen at some point in the future. So it can be easy to discount the present. But nobody knows how much healthy future we all have.
These are all things that I'm trying to be better at and so I'm writing them down here as a reminder. How do you manage your work-life balance?
Cover photo by Christopher Gower on Unsplash
I started my undergraduate degree as a computer science and physics student. But despite my love of technology (and physics, incidentally), I quickly realized that I didn't want to end up as a software developer. I was interested in so many other things: art, design, business, real estate, entrepreneurship, cities, and so on. And at the time, I was struggling to remain focused on writing code.
So by the middle of my second year, I decided to drop every single one of my classes and construct my own program until I figured out what I truly wanted to major in. My course schedule ended up spanning everything from the urbanization of ancient cities to the philosophy of aesthetics. It was a pretty great program if you ask me. But others wondered what I was doing.
I did, however, already have leanings toward architecture. It felt like the perfect combination of art and science. And so while enrolled in my made up program, I started exploring the possibility of transferring schools and switching majors. Around this time I also started meeting with architects to try and learn more about the profession and see if this is something that I really wanted to pursue.
I'll never forget this one lunch. The architect I met with -- who will, of course, remain nameless -- told me very clearly: "You should do anything besides architecture. If you like drawing become an animator. If you like design, do graphic design. Just don't become an architect." Naturally, I came out of that lunch and decided to spend the next seven years getting two degrees in architecture.
And even though I never became a licensed architect, and almost certainly never will, I would do it all over again given the option. I loved the journey and it is this circuitous journey that led me to where I am today, which is in a highly fulfilling career in real estate. I create new things and those things have the opportunity to improve people's everyday lives. I'm grateful for that. But the path was anything but clear at the time.
I am telling all of you this story because I was reminded of it when I read this fantastic article by Charles Duhigg called, Wealthy, Successful and Miserable. It is the story of how Charles, a Harvard Business School graduate, discovered that -- despite obtaining boatloads of financial success -- many of his classmates actually ended up miserable after school.
Sure, we all need and deserve basic financial security. And when we don't have it, money can really buy a great deal of happiness. But there's lots of research out there, some of which I have written about before, that suggests that happiness quickly plateaus once our basic needs are met.
As soon as we're no longer worried about money, we actually crave other things from our paychecks. We want it to also be a source of purpose and meaning. To give one concrete example, the article cites a study about a set of enthusiastic and high performing janitors in a large hospital. What was ultimately found was that they saw their jobs not just as cleaning, but as a kind of healing for the patients. They had purpose.
But what I found most interesting about the article was the discovery that finding happiness in life and business might require, or be aided by, a bit of struggle along the way:
And many of them had something in common: They tended to be the also-rans of the class, the ones who failed to get the jobs they wanted when they graduated. They had been passed over by McKinsey & Company and Google, Goldman Sachs and Apple, the big venture-capital firms and prestigious investment houses. Instead, they were forced to scramble for work — and thus to grapple, earlier in their careers, with the trade-offs that life inevitably demands. These late bloomers seemed to have learned the lessons about workplace meaning preached by people like Barry Schwartz. It wasn’t that their workplaces were enlightened or (as far as I could tell) that H.B.S. had taught them anything special. Rather, they had learned from their own setbacks. And often they wound up richer, more powerful and more content than everyone else.
We are, of course, talking about the "also-rans" at Harvard Business School. They're no slouches struggling to find work. But I don't think that negates the point being made here. It can be easy to get caught up doing what we think we ought to be doing when in reality we should be finding meaning in something we hopefully love doing.
2003/2004 was roughly the time period when I started to become interested in development as a career. My good friend Rick Sole and I used to talk about it all the time in architecture school. How do we break into this space? There are no formal paths, like law for instance, and so we felt like we had to create our own opportunities.
What I ended up doing was creating a list of every developer that I felt was doing cool and interesting work. I didn’t know enough about the industry at the time to assess other things and so that was really my only criteria. Do they care about design in their projects? I then started cold emailing and cold calling.
Not everyone got back to me, but many did and some agreed to meet with me. This was at a time when I had zero experience and I was frankly not very valuable as a hire. So I am incredibly grateful to all of the people who said yes and took the time to speak and meet with me.
As you go through your career, this curve eventually flips. You go from having no experience and begging people to meet with you to having experience (and other things you can offer people) and people now wanting to meet with you. Generally people want to meet when they think they can gain from you.
But the best way to build a relationship is to start when you don’t need anything. I will never forget the people that met with me when I had nothing to offer them. And you can bet that I will always have all the time in the world for them.
I’m not going to claim that I respond to every one of my cold emails. I definitely do not. But I respond to as many as I can and I try and pay it forward with some time. You could say it’s playing the long game, but it’s probably also the right thing to do.
How do you approach relationship building?