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The Case for Staying in the Weeds
Success is usually defined as having lots of people working under you — what if that’s all wrong?
Picture someone you view as “successful,” and what image comes to mind?
Maybe it’s the scrappy entrepreneur who started in their garage and now works with 100 employees under them. Or the executive who has multiple assistants and thus doesn’t read her incoming emails anymore. Or the cake-maker who now spends more time promoting his bestselling cookbooks and TV shows rather than baking the cakes that made him famous.
In each of those scenarios, the successful person in question has taken on more and more responsibility and acclaim. In the process, they’ve probably delegated many of the day-to-day details of their business (and perhaps of their life) to other people who work for them. We often see this as the goal we’re all working towards — the way we know we’ve “made it.”
But what if this is all backwards?
We live and work in an economy defined by the expectation of linear, if not exponential, growth. But rarely do we pause to consider the consequences of that assumption. These, of course, span from the environmental and human rights-related—keep in mind that in nature’s terms, unchecked growth is called a cancer—to the phenomenon of burn-out that has come to define the modern working life for so many of us.
Human beings, and the natural world they inhabit, are simply not built to keep growing and progressing at a constant clip. Our economy and prevailing idea of success are both a total mismatch for how we’re designed to operate.
But there’s something else, something that I’ve observed from multiple vantage points in my working life: When people get successful and leave the day-to-day granular details of whatever it is they do behind, they lose a lot of the joy that started them there in the first place. They very often lose control of their business, brand, or good reputation, too. By becoming successful and allowing the in-the-weeds details to become someone else’s problem, they undermine the very thing that brought their success, and perhaps even their purpose.
