This week my significant other and I drove up to Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon for a short getaway.
As usually happens, I substantially overestimated the amount of time I’d have available for work things (like this email list) and underestimated how sore my feet would get from hiking 13 miles. And honestly, I’m not even mad about it.
I’m drafting some emails about how to best model propellers in performance predictions, so those will be next week’s topic.
In the meantime, here are two thoughts I’ve been percolating for the past couple of weeks:
Add more of what you enjoy into your life. It’s trite, but I’m still going to repeat it.
Don’t wait for grand experiences or completely rework your career. Just do more of the things that bring you joy, and take a moment to genuinely treasure them.
I could have skipped that trip, and just stayed home to “catch up” on all of my work and avoid having to disentangle everything when I got back.
But humans were never meant to only ever work. There’s a whole grand, gorgeous world out there. We can’t truly catch up anyways, so why not have some fun?
You don’t have to earn joy. You deserve to just experience it.
Remember what work you’re really doing. I’ve said before that I’ve been much more serious this year about the “business” side of running a business.
But while trying to do everything “right,” I got lost. I started to see the business work as the real work. The engineering tasks were something I needed to clear out of the way so I could focus on what really mattered—what I told myself mattered.
I’ve had Adam Savage’s Every Tool’s A Hammer on my bookshelf for a while, and on a whim I opened it and started reading the intro. I don’t know what it was, but reading a handful of pages about making things gave me the jolt I needed.
I didn’t start my own business to do business things. I went into business to do the engineering work that I genuinely care about.
The core of my business isn’t writing content, filling my pipeline, streamlining my systems (my god, everyone is obsessed with talking about systems).
It’s making the dang airplanes.
If you’ve also started getting lost in your own work, forgetting what you’re really doing here, take a pause. What is your job or your business really meant to do? If you pare away the reporting, the overhead…what’s the true heart of your work?
And is there a way to remind yourself of that? When I get disillusioned, I like to visit aviation museums. I’m overdue for one.
In a way these two thoughts feed into each other. Add more of what you enjoy. Remember what work you’re really doing.
And go look at some cool rocks once in a while.