That question stuck with me. I wish I took it more seriously when I was being laid off. I still don’t have an answer for myself, and I hope that it is what I’m doing, but deep down I know that… well, that I don’t know what I don’t know.
And it got me thinking about the F word – the old and good failure. While failure (fyi, layoff is considered as failure in most cases) is not being celebrated, I figured that exactly those times create a chance to rethink, change and go in depth, My failed startup (and 6 months well wasted) – best teacher I’ve had about entrepreneurship, myself and what’s important. And also, how not to lose your mind while building your own revenue.
Dropping the limitations of failure makes this question a great exercise to explore what it is we find exciting to do with ourselves.
I found when I drop the possibility to fail, I thrive again.
In a way, It also forces us to notice how often, even when we have the agency to change our lives for the better, we still choose the familiar patterns that leave us out of control and unhappy.
Self-employed people agreeing to work with clients from hell. Falling back into employee habits by giving clients too much control over income and security (like yours truly). Laid off people wanting more agency yet searching for another job. Or people running their own business becoming overworked employees of the thing they created and hardly enjoying the perks (partly yours truly, again).
Because old patterns worked, we know them. New ones might be way better, but they might be more of a failure than the ones before so that’s why bad habits die hard.
When I look at my own days, the same tension shows up in a more personal way. My head started reaching for business value – of each interaction, each investment, every piece of content, every intro, every hour of paid work. My more creative, non-business-oriented self has a different intuition: pure fun, connection, reading, sharing, creating, exploring, and simply being me without calculating what those fifteen minutes cost.
I’m learning that the constant value filter is useful… and also it suffocates my creativity. I am not what I deliver. We as people are flawed, sometimes highly organised yet chaotic and creative beings who also deserve to call some of our time well wasted.
The sweet spot – still rolling in creative flow while delivering enough business value is where most of us are hoping to find happiness, trying to answer that original question about what’s worth doing if we knew we wouldn’t fail. For now I’ve chosen to deprioritise the pure business optimisation side, because what I’m doing is working. Why break it.
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