Success Should Expand Your Life, Not Consume It

We tend to know when a business is successful.

We can look at revenue, growth, market share, the size of the team or the opportunities it creates. We have all kinds of ways to measure how well a business is doing.

I think there’s another question worth asking:

What is that success allowing you to do with your life?

It’s possible to build an incredibly successful business that leaves very little room for anything else. In fact, the better you become at what you do, the easier it is for this to happen. More opportunities come your waym more people rely on you and your responsibilities increase because you’ve proven you can handle them.

Eventually, you can reach a strange point where you’ve achieved much of what you were working toward, but you have less freedom than you expected success to bring.

And I think this is where we sometimes confuse the problem.

We assume we need to want less.

Maybe we’ve become too ambitious. Maybe the business has become too big. Maybe the answer is to stop growing, take on less or become better at saying no.

Sometimes it is.

But I think there’s a question that should come before all of those:

Does your success still depend on you doing more?

The way we build in the beginning can become a problem later

Most businesses start with a fairly simple relationship between effort and results. If you want more business, you go out and create it.

That makes sense when you're building something.

It makes much less sense when you've been successful for twenty years and you're still operating as though every additional level of growth requires another piece of your time.

At some point, the work has to change.

You start looking more carefully at where you’re actually valuable. You notice what you're doing because you're good at it and what you're doing because nobody has ever taken it off your plate. You question processes that made sense five years ago. You become more thoughtful about where people, systems and technology can make the business work better.

This is where I think the conversation about growth gets interesting.

Because growth isn't only about getting bigger.

Sometimes growth is being able to produce the same result with less effort. Sometimes it's being able to take on more without working more. Sometimes it's removing yourself from something you once believed required you.

And sometimes it's realizing that the next stage of the business requires a different version of your role within it.

A better business should give something back

We spend a lot of time talking about what we’re willing to give our businesses.

Our time. Our attention. Our ideas. Our energy. Years of our lives.

Far less attention is given to what the business should eventually give back.

And I don't just mean financially.

A well-built business should create some degree of freedom. It should give you more choice over how you spend your time and where you put your attention. It should allow you to use more of what you're particularly good at and spend less time buried in work someone or something else could handle.

That matters professionally.

It also matters because there is a life happening alongside the business.

We may need a bigger definition of ambition

There’s an idea about successful people that I've never particularly liked: that eventually we should learn to slow down.

What if you don't want to?

Some people genuinely love building things. They like pursuing ideas, taking on challenges and seeing what they're capable of creating.

The problem isn't necessarily that they want too much from their careers.

It may be that we've defined ambition too narrowly.

Why can't someone be ambitious about building an exceptional business and also be ambitious about having an interesting life?

There are things worth making room for that will never appear on a résumé or contribute to the bottom line. Creative interests. Relationships. Travel. Learning. Experiences. Projects you pursue simply because you're curious about them.

They don't need to become businesses to justify the time you spend on them.

And they aren't evidence that you're less serious about your work.

They are part of a successful life.

So what are you building toward?

I think this is the question we should ask more often.

Not simply, How big do you want the business to become?

What do you want the business to make possible?

That answer will be different for everyone. Which is why there can't be one model for what a successful business or a successful life should look like.

For one person, success may mean building a large organization. For another, it may mean staying deliberately small. Someone else may want enough flexibility to raise a family, travel for three months a year, write a book, make music, start another company or spend Wednesday afternoons doing absolutely nothing productive.

The point isn't what you choose.

The point is whether the business you're building supports it.

That’s what I mean when I say:

Build a better business. Build a bigger life.

Success shouldn't ask you to keep shrinking everything else to accommodate it.

It should give you more possibilities for what comes next.