Category: Life

The next topic in this series on Life Design that I’d like to give some thoughts to is on the tension between scaling vs. simplicity. Scaling is a fun word. When you have a business, the idea is to grow and expand. And the way you do that is to scale. Scaling your business simply means that you put systems and processes in place that then allow your business to naturally grow. It’s about automating and delegating tasks, hiring teammates, and spending money on marketing.

If you want your business to grow, you have to scale. But before you make that decision, you have to decide whether you want your business to grow. That may sound like a stupid question: Of course you want your business to grow! But I think it’s actually a really important question.

Here’s the question I’ve been asking myself for awhile: “What exactly do I want?” Here’s the truth: I’m very satisfied with where I am. More growth means more complexity, and these days I’m very much valuing simplicity. The tension is found in the principle that if you’re not moving forward, you’re actually drifting. I don’t want that.

A few years ago I went through Michael Hyatt’s Free to Focus course, and it made a huge difference in the way I organize my life and business. I began putting systems in place. Hyatt says that before you can delegate you have to automate, and before you automate you have to eliminate. The elimination and automation made a huge difference for me. You could say that they have helped me to scale.

One thing that you should know about me is that in my 20 plus years of working, I have rarely been managed by others, and I haven’t done a ton of managing others. I have been a solo entrepreneur in most of my ventures. In some ways that has made me into a jack of all trades, and perhaps in some ways a master of none. I’m good at a lot of things, and I enjoy doing most of those things.

I realize that I could hire people to do the things I’m not crazy about. That’s important. What is more important, at least to those who advocate scaling, is that I could hire people to do things I like, but which do not generate income. That way I can spend more time doing those activities that generate income. That makes a lot of sense, but it causes me to again ask the question, “But do I need to generate more income?” That is a life design question.

I don’t know where I first heard the story of the Mexican fisherman who met the American investment banker. Do you know this story? Rather than retell the story myself, below is the story from a site called bemorewithless.

An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked.  Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna.  The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The Mexican replied, “only a little while. The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish? The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs. The American then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?”

The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my amigos.  I have a full and busy life.” The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.”

The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”

To which the American replied, “15 – 20 years.”

“But what then?” Asked the Mexican.

The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part.  When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!”

“Millions – then what?”

The American said, “Then you would retire.  Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”

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I continue to come back to this story as I make decisions about my business and my life. As I said in the first post in this series, what I’ve been working on for awhile is designing my life, and then fitting my business into it. This is in contrast to designing your business, and then working to fit your life into it.

If the Mexican fisherman’s desired life was to sleep late, fish a little, play with his children, take siestas with his wife, and stroll into the village each evening where he would sip wine and play guitar with his amigos, and if he currently had that life now, why in the world would he change it?

Yet so many of us believe that the good life will only come once we retire. Plus, because of debt and the accumulation of too much stuff, we don’t believe that we can afford to do anything but work long hours.

When I retired from vocational ministry, I wasn’t retiring like most people retire. For one thing, I was only 43 years old. But the main difference was that I had another job. So now, instead of two jobs I’d just have one. But I also now had 15-20 extra hours in my week. Even more important, as I mentioned in the last post, I now had mental space that I had not had in a long time. This created a simplicity that I had not experienced.

Scaling is a powerful thing. My business partner has continued to encourage me to give some tasks up. There have been times that I’ve fought that, even though I knew it was the right move. In our real estate development business I’ve handed off more of the finances, we’ve set up systems for purchasing, and we’ve hired a construction manager. This has cost some money of course, but it’s meant that I can allocate those hours elsewhere, plus it means that we are actually functioning better because we’ve hired people better than ourselves for those tasks.

As I wrap up this post, know that I believe in scaling and growth. I just believe that you should ask some questions before automatically implementing these strategies. Live in the tension. That’s what I’m continuing to learn how to do.

Pt. 1: Life Design 101
Pt. 2: Rest and Responsibility
Pt. 4: Life Design – a theological perspective

Last week I shared the first of what I think will be four blog posts on Life Design. Today I want to share another piece to this. This is something that I’ve been thinking about for several years.

As you can see from the slide above, there are two axis: Rest and Responsibility. It’s my belief that all of us were created to carry Responsibility, but I’ve learned that this Responsibility is best carried out when it’s rooted in Rest. There are four quadrants that at a particular point in time we can be living in. They depend on the amount of Rest and Responsibility that we currently have.

When we have the proper amount of Responsibility, and when it’s fueled by the proper amount of Rest, then we are Healthy. That raises the questions, “What is the proper amount of Responsibility, and what is the proper amount of Rest?” There’s not one answer for that. It’s different for every person, and it’s different during different stages of our lives. What is important is that we don’t compare ourselves to others. Our capacities are different. The key to health is that we have the proper amount on our plate. Here’s the big thing I’ve learned about this: when you’re healthy, you know it. You feel fully alive!

The problem comes when we have high Responsibility but low Rest. When this happens, stress enters the picture, and we can easily become Overwhelmed. We all know this feeling. In fact, most of us live much of our lives in this place. And our culture champions us on in this feat: “exhaustion as a status symbol”, according to Brene Brown. We proudly wear our busyness as a badge of honor, and since work isn’t relegated to an office, it’s very tough to shut things off.

Our bodies cannot seem to physiologically get off the adrenaline rush in order to slow down. We battle to make the best use of every spare minute we have. We fear how things might fall apart if we slow down or stop, so we just keep going. We end our days exhausted from the endless demands being placed on us. We know we need to rest and recharge, but who has time for that when the _________ is hanging by a thread? Soon even our “free time” becomes filled with demands as we try to squeeze more “doing” into an already overburdened life.
Peter Scazzero

I think we all know what this feels like.

What happens when there is high Rest but low Responsibility? We become Comfortable. When I left my job as a pastor, Responsibility went WAY down. I wasn’t constantly thinking about how the people I was leading were doing. It was honestly pretty amazing. I had more time on my hands, but more important, I had a mental space that I hadn’t had in a LONG time. While it was a nice change of pace, I knew that having low Responsibility was unsustainable in the long run, just as having low Rest is unsustainable in the long run. I didn’t necessarily want the same level of Responsibility that I had previously had, but there were some things I was still passionate about, and I was going to need to figure out how to still do those things.

“Bored” is the best word I could come up with for the quadrant where there is low Rest and low Responsibility. You might wonder what the difference is between here and Comfortable. The key is that the things you are doing with your downtime aren’t truly leading to Rest. What we think of as rest is often not rest at all. We have to make sure that during our downtime we are actually participating in activities that truly fill our tanks. A little bit of Netflix and social media might be helpful when resting, but too much can end up having negative consequences. The key point here is that having low Responsibility does not automatically mean that you have high Rest.

One thing I’ve learned about this is that there is a vicious cycle at play here. Think back to the last time you were truly Overwhelmed with work, or perhaps even with life itself. You felt that you were running on fumes, and you found yourself desperate for real rest. In that moment the tendency is to think you can crash for a few hours or a few days, and then go back to what you were doing before. It is very easy to simply veg out. However, that may not get you to where you need to be. A deep state of rest leads you to a place where you are no longer striving, and there’s unfortunately no button we can push that brings us to this place.

As of this moment today, I’d say I’m somewhere between the Comfortable and Healthy place. I’m definitely no longer Overwhelmed, and I’m not Bored. My level of Responsibility is not what it was three years ago, but I think it’s at a proper place. Over the past year I’ve invested in a bit of coaching, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what I’m truly passionate about, and where I should invest my time. That has been fruitful work.

Pt. 1: Life Design 101
Pt. 3: Scaling vs Simplicity
Pt. 4: Life Design – a theological perspective

A few months ago I was listening to a BiggerPockets podcast featuring Tarl Yarber. It was a great podcast for a number of reasons, but there was one line in it that stood out most. He was quoting a friend of his (Thatch Nguyen) when he said, “Most people build their business and then work to fit their life into it. Instead, why don’t you decide what kind of life you want to live, and then design your business to fit that lifestyle?”

Mic drop

I realized in that moment that I so resonated with this statement because it’s something I’ve been attempting to do for the last few years. I just didn’t have to vocabulary yet to describe it.

I first started thinking about life design a few years ago when I was debating stepping down as pastor of the church I had started a decade earlier. This was a difficult decision, but I knew that I wasn’t the healthiest version of myself. I was doing too much, and I was burned out. At the time I was making the decision, Adam was getting ready to enter the 8th grade, and I knew that I had five years before he went to college. I recognized that these last five years are pretty crucial, and I therefore knew that it was pretty crucial that I be healthy. I didn’t want to be a spectator for these years. I wanted to be present and active. Right then and there, I knew that my primary focus needed to be on my family.

This realization then caused me to ask the question, “So what do I want these five years to look like?” But I then recognized that there’s another question to ask before I asked this one? It’s this: “What do my sons need from me before they leave my house?” That’s a big question, and one that I needed to spend some time with.

At the end of the day, I thought about things in terms of time. Five years would pass quickly. And then another four would pass and Micah would be in college. Time was the most precious commodity. And I thought about time in terms of both quantity and quality. Both are important. When it comes to quality, it was less about me planning creative things for my kids and more about me being healthy so that I could give my best, not simply my left-overs. And side note…when it comes to quantity, I’m reminded that this pandemic has given me SO much more time with family than I could have ever planned for. And though at times this has been challenging, I’m very grateful for it.

I knew that I needed to spend some time developing a vision for my life. We are all taught to develop a vision for our business or organization, but rarely do we spend time developing one for our personal lives. How strange that is when you really think about it!

All of this thinking then led to a series of questions (side note – I love questions, as I find that one question leads to another question, often a deeper and more important question):

• What does the culture say leads to happiness/prosperity? In what ways do I agree with this, and in what ways do I disagree?
• What does a happy/successful/content/prosperous life look like?
• If I had all the time in the world, how would I spend it?
• Which is more important to me: more time or more money?
• What does our family enjoy doing?
• How much money do I need to make each year?
• How many hours do I need to work in order to make that much money?
• What does my ideal week look like?
• Since Mandy has a more traditional work schedule, what is the value of a flexible schedule?
• What makes me happy?

It’s been almost two and a half years since I made the difficult decision to leave vocational ministry. More than anything else, this was a life design decision. In order for my life to work the way I wanted it to work, I had to give some things up. This was one of them. As hard as it was to quit doing something that I had spent the previous two decades doing (and planning to do), it was the right decision. Asking these questions, and then making this decision, has led to a different kind of life. Stress has been at an all time low these last two years, I’ve recovered from burnout, and as a result I’m a healthier me.

Besides being more present for my family, I’ve also seen my business prosper as a result. And it wasn’t just about having more time. It was also about having more mental and emotional margin. I’ve written about this before, but I will say it again: margin often means that I see and take hold of opportunities that could be easily missed if it weren’t there.

Over the coming weeks I’m going to write at least a couple more posts dealing with what I’ve been learning about life design.

Pt. 2: Rest and Responsibility
Pt. 3: Scaling vs. Simplicity
Pt. 4: Life Design – a theological perspective

I’m starting a new blog series highlighting some of the things I’m learning. I’ve discovered that as an Enneagram 7 I move to Enneagram 5 in health. I love going deep with a topic that fascinates me. That happened with this first one in particular.

• 1996 Mt. Everest Disaster – I finished reading Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. I also read several articles and watched a documentary, a reality series and the 2015 movie. It’s a tragic story.
  
• Lifeonaire, by Steve Cook – I read this book in 2 days. It’s a fable, which means that at times it’s a bit corny. But it’s a great book about life design. I’m working on a blog series on life design. It’s a topic that has been deeply impacting me. This book helps you to ask some very important questions.
  
• The 12 Week Year, by Brian Moran – I first read this book a couple of years ago, but I decided to revisit it in the last couple of weeks. It makes such great sense that when we set goals that are to be fully accomplished 12 months from now, it’s easy to slack off in because the deadline seems so far away. With the 12 Week Year you set 2-3 goals for a 12 week period. That’s your year. You celebrate in week 13, and then it’s time for a new year. If you want to know more, check out this podcast from BiggerPockets.
  
• Real Estate Rockstars Podcast with Tarek El Moussa – this podcast is from a year ago, but I’m just now listened to it. Tarek is the host of a couple of HGTV shows. I enjoy his shows, but I didn’t know his story.

One morning last week I got up early and weeded the flower bed. Then I got the weedeater out and trimmed the alley. It was early, but I was still sweating so much. But it made me feel good. This is my land. It’s my flower garden with herbs that smell so good and are so great to cook with. And during that time I wasn’t faced with my normal work, which allowed for some much needed space.

Last Friday night I didn’t sleep well. It had been a long week, and I thought I would sleep so well. Instead, I woke up at 2am and never went back to sleep. So by the time Saturday afternoon rolled around I was pretty tired. So I decided to move both vehicles into our back yard where there’s more shade, and then for two hours while listening go some good music, I cleaned them out, vacuumed them, and washed them. Again, much sweat. But it felt good to to work hard and to know that I was taking care of the things that I have.

I wouldn’t normally think that work like this fills my tank, but it truly did.

It has been three months since I wrote that post on Facebook. For the next week or so after writing that I sought to do something each day that made me happy. I knew that things were weird because of the pandemic, and that was going to have an impact on me. Remember what a scary chore it was to get groceries those first few weeks!

As helpful as those inputs were then, I’ve found that they’re even more important when the pace picks back up. As I mentioned a few days ago, I’m busier with work than I have been in a long time. And as great as that is, I haven’t been taking care of myself very well, and I find myself a bit burned out. I’m reminded that when things get hectic, it’s even more important that I say yes to the right things. It’s so important that I make time to do the things that truly fill my tank.

As I write this I’m on a 24 hour personal retreat. I began doing quarterly retreats years ago. They have become part of my routine, but I haven’t done one in awhile. It’s something I’ve missed. A retreat for me is about quiet and solitude. It’s a time that I go back to my journals and practice the discipline of reflection. It’s a time that I normally do some long-range dreaming and planning. And in the case of this retreat, it’s a time that I wanted to do some writing.

A few years ago I went on a bike ride, and I didn’t bother to take the time to check the air pressure on my tires. After all, they looked fine to me. If you’ve ever made this mistake, you know that my ride was way more work than it should have been. I learned that day that properly filled tires make for a fun ride.

I’ve learned through the years that my work can be rooted in rest or it can be rooted in striving. The results at first may be hard to distinguish, but over time it becomes clear. And much of it is determined by the current state of my soul. There are intentional things I can do that restore my soul just as there are things I can do that can deplete my soul. When my soul is depleted, it’s kind of like riding a bike with under-inflated tires. On the surface things look ok, but inside they’re not. And the problem is that you don’t know there is a problem until later. It wasn’t until I was on the last leg of my bike ride that I realized I was working way harder than I should have. It dawned on me then that I should have checked the tire pressure. That last leg was no fun to ride, but you better believe that every time since I’ve checked those tires.

So now I’m in the place where the pace is hectic. I’m juggling a lot of clients, we’re trying to make decisions as a family what school is going to look like, and Mandy is nervous about going back to the classroom. The pandemic and quarantine have impacted me just like they’ve impacted everyone else. In the midst of all of this, how will I care for my soul? What intentional practices will I do that all me to not simply survive but thrive during this time? These are key questions for a time such as this one.

About a week into quarantine I wrote a post on Facebook about the power of inputs. Here’s that post.

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about inputs. In normal life we do a lot of outputting. We struggle with inputs. When I say inputs I’m referring to putting things in that refuel you. It’s beauty and knowledge; it’s things that remind you to slow down and breathe deeply; it’s things that cause your passions to stir.

When we are in our normal running and gunning, it seems that we are often running on fumes, and the inputs we do allow ourselves often don’t really fill our tanks. Another way of saying that is that we choose the wrong inputs.

So now we find ourselves in a place where, for perhaps the first time in our lives, we are no longer running and gunning. We have more time on our hands than normal, which means that we have more time for inputs than normal. That is good, but it’s still important to gauge what inputs actually do the job.

When so much of the news is producing in us anxiety more than anything else, is it a healthy input? If so, would a good discipline be to only read the news once or twice a day? This applies to sites like the NY Times, Daily Memphian, or CNN, but also to Facebook or Twitter.

How about tv and movies? It’s a great opportunity to catch up on some shows (our family is watching the Marvel movies), but at what point does it no longer fill our tanks and instead produce in us something negative?

These are the two areas I’ve been thinking the most about. Maybe there are other areas that for you deserve the questions.

Once I’m asking those questions, I need to ask the next set of questions…What inputs do fill my tank, fight anxiety, and cause true rest?

Here are some things that have been helpful to me…

Reading a novel
Researching a new topic
Reading Scripture
Reading a book on a topic that relates to your field of work
Reading a magazine
Cooking a new recipe
Praying/meditating
Taking a walk while listening to music
Taking a walk while listening to a podcast (not news or politics-related)
Taking a walk while not listening to anything (what a concept!)
Speaking of music, finding a new artist to listen to
Taking a virtual tour of a museum (lots of museums throughout the world are offering these)
Taking a nap
Going for a hike
Going for a bike ride
Doing yoga
Gardening
Catching up with an old friend via phone or FaceTime
Writing in a journal
Brainstorming with others ways to help those who are struggling
Reading through your old journals (this is one of my favorite activities)

In summary, inputs are good, and it’s a positive thing that in the days, weeks, and perhaps months ahead of us, we have more time for inputs than normal. The tricky thing is that not all inputs produce in us what we’re hoping for and what we truly need. So the great need for us is to choose wisely what inputs we’re taking in.