The Adventure of Change

Several months ago, I decided to make a significant change in my life: I left a business I built and ran for the better part of seven years. It was hard. Harder than I thought it would be.

After years of grinding away at the work I did, the work I thought I really loved to do, I realized I was burnt out and no longer connecting with the work, the people, the industry I had invested so much time in. I started to question what I was doing, whether I was happy doing it, weather I was ever happy doing it, how it affected my life, what to do next… I had a lot of questions. Questions I had no answers for.

This is not new and not new for me. This was perhaps the fourth business I had built and the seventh I had a major part in building. I felt like a pattern was now visible: I would get attracted to the possibility of building something, leading something, being an expert in a venture. Then, I would work my tail off; spend more hours than are healthy pushing myself, my team, the business to various successes eventually leading to physical and mental exhaustion. Finally, unable to continue, perhaps disenchanted with the work, the industry, my partners, the potential future of the venture, I would step away from all I invested to pursue something that felt better since what I had been doing no longer felt right for me.

My m.o. over the years has been to move quickly from what I was doing to something I was more interested in, and moving quickly to it – not stopping to dwell or think to hard about what I was doing, where I might be going, and whether I might be making the right decision for me or not. For a long time I’ve looked at this roller coaster ride of ventures as failures, as me quitting. As me not being able to follow through. We have so much pressure to follow through, to carry things out to their logical end, to not give up, to not quit. So I stayed with each venture until I couldn’t stand it any longer. And then I would feel the guilt and pain of giving something up I’ve worked so hard for because I knew there was no other alternative for me.

So, when I embarked on yet another journey of change a few months ago, I decided to take it slow. I decided to not try and answer any questions, to not try and fill in any gaps, to slow down and observe. I went from feeling I had all the answers (or could find them) to understanding that I don’t, and that this – life, love, career, happiness, wellbeing – is a journey with no end, or at least no visible destination. It’s a fog. And we meander around in the fog and try and stay on a path that feels right in our gut.

My contribution to this wellbeing project – of which I am honored to participate in, especially given the group of authors with vast knowledge of life and wellbeing – will be a sort of journal of my adventure, a diary of my discoveries in my effort to attain creative wellbeing and a more balanced and higher state of whole life wellbeing.

One of the things I have realized in this journey is that while I found elements of happiness in what I had been doing throughout the years, I may not have actually been doing something that brings consistent happiness. Sort of like: I can find happy moments riding on a bus, but I probably wouldn’t be happy just by riding a bus every day. Through this small realization I could see that I was constantly being sucked into things that brought those moments of happiness, but that career fulfillment was not there – and perhaps this has been missing in many of my past ventures. Maybe the quest for happiness, the pressure to find it, had me grasping at anything that brought elements of happiness? These are the types of questions I began to discover and explore only recently.

In these explorations, I am starting to find elements that are important to my creative wellbeing – ingredients necessary for me to feel happy and fulfilled. The biggest ingredient is a sense of flow – getting in the zone of what I’m passionate about, losing myself it. As a creative person I learned early on that when I find that special “flow” state, that it is where the magical things happen – the new discoveries, the innovation, that stuff that excites me. But over the 15 years or so of my career I enter that state of flow less and less. Until one day (with the help of my coach) I realized I rarely, if ever, get into the flow without having to stay up all night to find the time. And those times are harder to make happen.

And that is when it hit me: I need to be in the flow to be happy, to bring satisfaction to what I’m passionate about. But I need to make time for this. I need to be protective of that time. I need to be confident with setting that time aside, asking for it, believing in it, and honoring it. I am seeing now that for years the type of design work I’ve been doing, the businesses I’ve been building are in industries that have fast turn-arounds, hence less and less time for flow. In placing a priority on making time for flow, I am inching ever closer to a more ideal type of work, perhaps a slightly different industry, where the need for time to enter that flow state is an accepted part of the process and where I can be secure with asking for and maintaining that time for flow when I need it.

And in this discovery is a broader understanding that I can benefit from creating time for flow in other parts of my life. I need to slow down, clean the slate, and make time to be present, to immerse myself and let the discoveries happen – whether it be time with my son and wife, time with friends and family, time for flow in what I’m passionate about, time for me to philosophize. I think it is so easy in our culture to try and be faster and faster, more and more productive and efficient – to squeeze more things into the short time we have. But I think to achieve whole life wellbeing, we really need to bring slowness to our loves. We need to be present in the journey, be in the flow. Reduce the to-do list from 20 things a day to two and get into the flow for those.

You’re only here for a short visit. Don’t hurry. Don’t worry. And be sure to smell the flowers along the way. – Walter Hagen