The owner wasn’t sitting with me by himself.
His father was there, too.
Or at least everything his father had taught him.
“Stay in control. Do everything yourself. Keep the team small.”
He’d bought the business from his dad a few years back and had already grown it well past anything his father built. He was making more money than he ever thought he would.
He was also still doing all of it himself, and he was at his limit.
There was a partnership on the table. The kind that could substantially expand the business. He’d been turning it over for months.
I asked him what he was afraid of.
He was afraid of working even harder. He was afraid of losing control. He was afraid of all the things that his dad taught him to be afraid of.
And he was holding it. In his gut. In his tight shoulders.
“I got a good thing going. Why would I want to risk it?”
I hear that a lot. It sounds perfectly reasonable. Until the owner collapses from a combination of firefighting stress and soul-sucking boredom.
“I watched my dad do the same thing every day until it wore him down. He retired at 60 absolutely exhausted. I don’t want to be him.”
He was afraid of being like his father. But to be different went against everything that he had absorbed from him.
The decision was simple. Partner or not? Give it a try, or not?
But the weight went back decades.
Take a look at your to dos.
What’s the one where you just can’t quite move? The one that’s been sitting there for months?
What are you making that decision mean?
Not just to you. About you.
I’ll go into more detail on how to think about it in this week’s Substack. Subscribe here: