I wonder if it will always be this way.
It’s so natural for me to just get up at 7.30 on a Saturday and start working.
I’ve been doing that since I got serious about creating the life I truly wanted back in high school, and not much has changed from there.
I was an excellent student. Not because I was super smart, I am smart enough, but because I was super diligent. Because I was in the library till it closed. Or I was at home, ear plugs in, blocking out the noise of my rowdy family, working away until I was too tired to continue.
That served me well at Goldman too. Some nights there was no too tired to continue, and I would still be sitting in my seat when the sun rose the next morning.
I wonder if it will always be this way for me? Will I make different choices at some point?
My girlfriend isn’t so into it. She says I work too much, that I need to take more time off, that there’s more to life than Do What You Want, there’s also enjoying having what you want.
And she’s right. It’s a big part of what I practice and preach. But, there’s something about it that she’ll never quite get. It’s that for me doing my work is what I want. It’s not about what my work gets me. It’s not about getting paid or finishing it up, it’s that I am more engaged in doing my work than most people or things.
In the old days that was false. In the old days I was driven by fear and the need to succeed. In university that fear driving me making the difference between working full-time at KFC and landing at Goldman Sachs. The same was true up until a few years ago. Working around the clock, Wall Street by day, Do What I Want by night, but today its very different.
Today I just love what I do. She wants me to be at brunch, but I tell her that people who have things more important they love to do ain’t sitting at brunch for a few hours. And they certainly ain’t sitting at brunch, even with her sexy friends, yammering on what-ever sipping on a bloody mary.
Instead I like to work when I’m working and be doing what I want when I’m not. I have zero interest sitting at brunch when I can be doing what I love. And I have zero interest blowing away a couple hours on a Saturday morning because, as she says, “that’s just what people do.”
That’s because people can’t do that during the week, I tell her. It’s their escape to be at brunch on a Saturday, but when you do what you want then, like one of my favorite movies says, Every Day Is A Saturday. And while a couple hour brunch might be a good escape for her, skiing the entire season is more for me.
Doing what you want means doing what you want. That is different things to all of us, I tell her. She smiles. She doesn’t like it, she tells me she doesn’t know what she sees in me, but she does – she likes I do what I want.