Entrepreneurs can become consumed by their companies. I’ve seen marriages, relationships with children, values, and health all sacrificed to all-consuming companies. It’s important for us to keep track of the big picture. Why did we start the company? What major problem are we trying to solve? Also, and even more importantly: What do we want for ourselves? What core principles and values are driving our actions? Becoming myopically focused on the needs of our company can lead us to becoming efficient but ineffective at best and destructive at worst.
As an entrepreneur, it is easy to make a list of what our companies need: a stronger focus on sales, better systems and processes, a healthier culture, etc. We can rattle these things off about our business without a second thought. What is harder for most of us is to list out what we need.
I was just doing this exercise with a colleague. The goal was to list out the activities that we were excellent at doing and that gave us a strong sense of fulfilment. When describing the actions he chose to list, he used phrases like “this is what the business needs,” and “I think I could find passion around this.” He couldn’t separate what he wanted from what his company needed. I know he is not alone because I do this too.
Finding the right center
It is easy to get caught in a spiral where we build ourselves around the business instead of building the business around ourselves. There is obviously give and take here. To stubbornly expect the world to conform to our wants and needs is to set ourselves up for failure. However, to lose sight of what we’re striving for – for ourselves and for the world, sets us up on the dangerous slope of becoming slaves to our business.
In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey talks about those among us become off-center (my words, not his). We are off-center when we focus exclusively on one aspect of our lives (work, kids, money, status, etc.). Many of us entrepreneurs can overly weight ourselves toward work. In essence, we become servants to our companies. Like children, our companies can be very needy creatures. There are times when they need an outsized amount of support.
Covey encourages us to live a principle-centered life. Easier said than done. I’ve been working on defining my own values and mission for years. I’m definitely closer than I was when I started, but I don’t feel like I’m done. In any case, even if imperfect, it is important to have something outside of work (or family, money, kids, spouse, etc) on which to center ourselves. Otherwise, it is too easy to be consumed by those other important aspects of our lives.
Thanks to Steven Weeks for his photo of a young garden.