ISSUE #024 | THE LEADERSHIP CONTRARIAN
A leader I know said this on a call last week:
“My greatest tension is between my family and my business. My task list got so big I’m defaulting to sacrificing time with my family, skipping pickups, working from eight to eleven.”
Then, a beat later, something deeper came out:
“I’m thinking it’s up to me because God can’t help and I got to do all the work and I’m disconnected from how good He is and how much He can provide.”
Now, that second one is the real diagnosis. The first one is just the symptom.
I hear some version of this from almost every founder I work with. The pressure is real: costs are up, margins are tighter, and being profitable is harder than it’s been in a long time. There really is more to do than there are hours in the day.
But the answer is not to work harder.
We’ve quietly mistaken the grind for a strong work ethic. They are not the same thing.
A grind mindset says every day is harvest, every hour is critical, every minute belongs to the business. That’s not work ethic. That’s a slow sentence to burnout, a missed marriage, and kids who grew up while you were heads-down.
If you actually want a healthy company AND a healthy marriage AND healthy kids AND a healthy you, there’s a different path.
1. Partner with God First
The deepest issue is not your calendar. It’s the lie underneath the calendar that is telling you it’s all on you.
Scripture says God is the author of work itself. He designed it.
It says that God works too and He is always at work. He didn’t just design it to be punishing. He designed it because He’s a worker and He is good, therefore, His “kind” of work is Good.
He wants to partner with us. We were never meant to work outside of our relationship with Him.
Your job is to operate inside the envelope of what is actually yours to carry, not what was never yours to begin with.
Your business is one subsystem of a full-life ecosystem. Treat your company like the whole ecosystem and the other subsystems start to fail.
2. Work in Rhythm, Not in Grind
The Universe and everything in it runs on cycles. There is no part of how God designed the world that runs at 100% all the time.
Agriculture gives us the clearest picture. Four seasons. Each one has a job.
Spring is preparation and planting. You ramp up. You break ground.
Summer is steady work. Water, watch, maintain. You put in your hours, then you stop and you eat dinner with your wife and your kids.
Harvest is the intense season. The fruit is ready and the window is short. You work from sunup to sundown. You work 12 and 15-hour days. In the old days every person in the family played a role; the older kids out in the field with you, the little ones carrying water to the workers or keeping the smallest from wandering off so the adults could keep going.
Only in the modern age have we shifted away from this, and lost touch with the rhythms of agriculture.
This is how families have lived for most of human history. There’s no shame in a harvest season. It’s the part of the year that funds every other part.
Winter is rest and pruning. The plants pull back. The farmer plans. There’s more space at the table. More space for family and marriage and maybe even hobbies.
Then the cycle starts again.
But here is the line nobody draws clearly enough:
Harvest is a season. It is not a lifestyle.
The grind says every day is harvest. The truth is, harvest is supposed to end. Then winter comes. Then you rest. Then spring comes and you start again.
If your business has been in permanent harvest for two years, that’s not a strong work ethic; it’s unsustainable and ultimately starves the future of your company.
It’s appropriate right here to say that, hopefully, you understand this is a metaphor to look at your business. There are things to learn from the rhythms of agriculture that we can apply to our business.
We need to make sure that we are taking time to work, time to rest, and regular time to invest in the core relationships in our world.
It’s not fair to think that if I just work hard now, there’ll be plenty of time later
Every season of a child’s life is different, and it changes. Each season is important for the next. They look to us as parents to pour into them, to care for them, and to equip them for a world they will eventually go out and work in.
I remember sitting in a room of about 40 or 50 entrepreneurs one day in the middle of a hotel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I listened to a man stand up and say that one of the things he was working on was helping marriages be a priority and something each person invests in.
He focused on his business in his first marriage, with the idea that if they just worked hard enough for five years, they would be set for the rest of their lives and would be able to enjoy each other and all of the fruits of their labor.
Before he hit those five years, his wife said, “I’ve had enough of being ignored,” and she left him.
I’m going to put one more cherry on top of this. Kids don’t care how much you give them or how quality the time is if the time is rare and all you’re doing is giving them gifts to make up for not spending time with them at all.
Frequency with your children is important. Quality is also important, but frequency is more important than being perfect.
3. Be Shrewd About What You Work On
When you’re working, work on the right thing.
Eighty percent of your energy should be focused on the one critical thing for this season of the company. Not all twenty-three items on the list. The one that, if you got it right, would lift everything else.
It turns out that knowing what to choose to work on is one of the highest skills of running a business. Knowing what the most important thing is, the next most important thing, and bringing all the resources needed to accomplish that, and doing that over and over again.
That’s shrewd, and it actually seems very counterintuitive to most people.
It turns out that focusing on one or two things at a time and then moving on to the next and the next and the next over the long haul will accomplish far more than working on 5, 10, 15, or 20 different things at the same time and moving all of them forward.
The lie is that the more you try to push forward, the more you’ll actually accomplish.
And when you’re thinking about being shrewd, think about this: build tractors whenever possible.
The agricultural revolution didn’t happen because farmers worked harder. It happened because somebody built a tractor and one person could do what ten used to do.
Same principle in your business. Some of the work in front of you equates to the harvest itself. Some of it is building the thing that will multiply every harvest after it. Know the difference and weigh your hours accordingly.
The Real Answer
A healthy marriage, a healthy family, and a healthy company at the same time is possible. It’s not produced by just working harder though.
It’s produced by partnering with God, working in rhythm with how He designed the world, and getting shrewd and being wise about what you actually work on when you do work.
The leader on my call started to see it when he named the lie underneath. He was disconnected from how good God is and how much He provides. That’s where the answer starts.
Not in another planner. Not in another productivity hack. In the honest moment of letting God carry what was always His to carry, and learning to work in seasons instead of in a permanent grind.
Harvest is coming. Then winter. Then spring. Trust the cycle. He designed it.
If this was helpful to you, email me and let me know.
Until next time,
Keep learning.
Keep growing.
And God bless,
Michael
