EXPLORE THE POETRY OF YOUR LIFE
Living the life of an entrepreneur has its privileges. One of them is choosing whether you’ll work 100 hours a week over the course of seven days or six. Every person who has ventured out into his or her own business knows the dark humor in this, even as he/she revels in the life of a free agent, accountable to no one but their own sense of ambition and industry. But, the truth is working so hard can work against your higher levels of success.
When I first went out on my own, as an entrepreneur, after more than fifteen years in the corporate world, where the phone always rang with people wanting to do business with me, I learned a valuable lesson about productivity. As the legions of self-employed before me had done, I performed numerous marketing tasks in order to drum up consulting projects and other work. I made phone calls, took meetings, made more phone calls, sent out letters and resumes, attended networking events and took more meetings. As every independent businessperson knows, attracting clients is a full-time job in itself.
I did whatever I could think of to let the world know that I was open for business. With sterling credentials and worldclass experience, I thought it would simply be a matter of answering the phone to field a flood of clients and projects. But, it wasn’t so simple. It was difficult at first. My phone didn’t ring off the hook like it did when I was the client.
Although I was surprised at the meager response to my efforts, I wasn’t overly concerned because I knew my work ethic would keep me pushing and pitching. Like many of you, I know that about myself. I know that I am relentless and indefatigable when pursuing a goal. And my goal then was to make it as a successful entrepreneur. I believed that by keeping the pressure on myself, it would be just a matter of time until the door swung wide with clients and cash flow.
One day (a Wednesday, I recall) during this intense period of dialing for clients, I found myself lying on my sofa, reading a book. It was a novel. Well… I was aghast. On a weekday afternoon? On my sofa? Reading something for . . . pleasure?! I remember actually looking around to see if anyone was watching me commit this unseemly crime of self-indulgence.
Then, I felt a gloom of guilt descend on me and I heard a voice deep within me somewhere lecturing myself about how unproductive I was being and how lazy I was. It was the voice of my “inner dictator” demanding that I needed to be making more phone calls, sending out more letters, attending more events, doing this and doing that to make something happen for my business. “Reading for pleasure?” the task-master implored. “Are you crazy? I’m going to tell your boss.” (”Or, your mother!” the primal authoritarian within me threatened.)
Then, just as I was ready to surrender to the command and flog myself into submitting to make 20 more phone calls, I heard another voice within. It was calm and soft and quiet. It said, “It’s okay. I’m exploring the poetry of my life, not the industry of my life.” And, immediately I felt an ease come over me.
The lesson I learned in that moment was that there is a balance point that needs to be paid attention to. Even an assembly-line machine has a cutoff switch and I needed to locate it within me and turn it off sometimes. Without guilt!
The irony is that, by refreshing and renewing our body and our mind by doing something purely for pleasure, even in the midst of an intense work period, we become even more productive and effective when we turn the switch back on and get back to work. This seems contradictory, antithetical and just plain illogical, but it’s the way of the “logical creative.”
Trammell Crow, one of the world’s most successful commercial real estate magnates and philanthropists, is known to actually schedule time for daydreaming in his busy day. He knows that this humble activity enables his body and mind to be refreshed and to enable creativity to flow more easily. He has discovered this secret of the logical creative and it makes him a more effective executive, and a happier person.
The coda to my story is that after allowing myself to continue to enjoy the poetry of my life that day, the phone rang the very next day with a high-paying consulting job. Interestingly, the call was not from one of the many contacts I’d made previously by following the industry of my life.
As a creative director for The Cola-Cola Company for ten years, a vice president of Universal Television, and a communications director of the 1996 Olympics, Neil Tepper has had a creative and fulfilling professional career. He now focuses on what he loves best helping people live more successful and meaningful lives through his unique insights into the creative process. Visit Neil’s website at www.neiltepper.com.
