Sometimes your ambitions move faster than the world. Sometimes the world moves faster than you.
I finished my last job of last year the week of
Christmas. I never have paid consulting work that late in the year. The preceding months are a blurred pastiche
of meetings, telecons, airports and familiar hotel rooms in cities I'd never
visited before. Back in August my business accelerated and by December I was tumbling down the chute that
opens with exhilaration then descends through fatigue, helplessness and exhaustion
before bottoming out in tangible, physical illness. Be careful what you wish for.
Sixteen days later I'm in a more familiar state of mind: my ambitions
moving faster than my world. I'm back to
wanting more than what's on offer. I'm
impatient and paranoid. Am I being deliberately
excluded? Are potential clients buying
my old book instead of hiring the new me?
The glass between me and a shining future is smudged with my greasy noseprints. I read the Euro crisis stories and fret that
last year was my financial high water mark.
Then I worry that a smarter, savvier me would look at the state of the
world and see where there's a quid to be made from all this chaos. A fortnight is a long time in
self-employment.
I've been at this Headcount:
1 game a long time now (viz. my previous post.) so here’s my advice to those underemployed
self-employed folks out there who spent the Christmas-New Year interregnum drinking too much and ignoring the gnawing knowledge that you don't
have guaranteed work lined up for January already. Reinhold Niebuhr’s
‘Serenity Prayer’ is always a good place to start: -
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,Courage to change the things I can,And wisdom to know the difference.
Self-employment means that is that there's no boss
to impress, no underling to browbeat and no rivalrous colleague to
outmanoeuvre. The brutal truth is that only thing you get to
change is you.
January 6 is just too soon to start badgering clients so you're tempted to run headlong at all those clichéd resolutions: diet & exercise,
better sleep patterns and commendable reading habits. This impulse is prophylactic at best; racking up cosmic
credits for the next time the spiralling chute opens beneath you. Except that there is no godly ledger balancing a January
spent at the gym against a May-time diet of airport pizza and beer. At worst these resolutions are symptomatic of
the very mismatch between ambition and action that you're looking to
escape. Even as you sweat over The Economist some part of you knows
that you're just waiting for the phone call that will fill your days. Diet and exercise might be change but not the
sort you can really believe in.
Devoting all this excess time to your actual business can be more damaging
still. Parkinson’s Law assumes at least some sort of deadline.
My advice to my time-rich client-poor comrades is as follows: -
Find some small, new, discrete thing and do it well.
Not some rambling yearlong project. You have one of those already: building your
business. Rather that small thing that
is affordable in terms of both your time and money but that doesn't require you waiting on anyone else. A one-off class. A lecture.
A walk to a place you've never been before. An afternoon taking photos. A blog post.
Don't reorganise your life but somehow extend it. A measure might be this to complete some thing that allows you to greet your life
partner at the door with, “Guess what I did today?” Achievement, no matter how
minor, is not risible
Create small ambitions that are under your control and sit them
alongside those larger ones that are not.
But do this small thing for its own sake, not with one eye fastened on
the far side of the smudgy glass.
And don't worry too much about the 2012. My reading of the news is that we all, those with bosses and offices and those without, are going to hell in a hand
basket of soon-to-be resurrected European currencies anyway.
Happy New Year.
