Life Changer

Had a fascinating conversation with a younger friend of mine the other day. He’s in his mid-forties and on the cusp of a sizable promotion at work. He was trying to decide whether it would be worth it to uproot his family and move away in pursuit of this new position which offered both much more money and greater respect and prestige in his profession. The opportunity to build greater wealth had a lot of appeal for him, since it might allow him to retire earlier than he had thought possible. Still, the upheaval it would bring to his family dynamic and quality of life was a concern. 

As I listened to him it occurred to me that when I was in my mid-forties, something happened to me that forever changed my perspective on the entire money/prestige thing. Emergency open heart surgery will do that to a person, I suppose.

I never had some dramatic, Hollywood-style epiphany. In the weeks of recovery afterwards I was too busy trying to put one foot in front of the other to bother myself with deep existential thoughts about the universe and my place in it. But once I returned to work, something had changed. My business is an intensely competitive enterprise which runs on the twin engines of money and growth. One thing always suggests the other. You are either getting bigger and wealthier or you are shrinking and dying...or so says the conventional wisdom. However, I discovered that there is nothing quite so clarifying of thought than the prospect of eminent death. Suddenly, I started examining everything in business through the prism of, is this really as critical as I think it is? It didn’t take long for me to realize that when it came to the old paradigm of growth and more and more...my heart just wasn’t in it anymore. 

So, I started making changes. I replaced income goals with vacation goals. My primary driver would no longer be exponential growth, but sustainable, manageable growth. I would trade in an increasingly more complex future for a much slower pace. Each year on January 1, the question became, how much time off will I take this year? And since I work for myself and there is no such thing as vacation pay, that meant that I had to be willing to accept less money. In the fifteen years that have gone by since I lay in that cold room counting backwards for the nice Asian anesthesiologist, I suppose I have forfeited quite a bit of money. On the other hand, I’ve never missed a single moment that mattered with my family. I’ve had time to read a thousand books, write a million words...and I have taken some incredible vacations! 

Owning your own business makes all of this possible. I am grateful to be where I am. I’m aware that for people who work for someone else, these decisions can’t be made as easily. My work has placed me in the enviable position of having a measure of control over my schedule and my income. The freedom that comes from such ownership is the single greatest benefit of my life’s work. But, getting off the big, bigger, biggest treadmill was the best decision I ever made, which means that having open heart surgery at age 45 was one of the best things that ever happened to me. 

How weird is that?