When we are young, or when we are raw amateurs starting out in an industry, we are deeply obsessed with status symbols. We look ahead at the operators who are further down the track and we envy the weight they carry. We impute a massive amount of “coolness” and maturity to their burdens.
I am reminded of my days at boarding school. In those years, our faces were smooth, but a select few chaps started growing facial hair early.
To the rest of the dorm, these guys were gods. They were masculine, they were advanced, they had arrived. Everyone looked at them and thought, “That is so cool. I wish I had to shave.”
But if you asked the chaps actually holding the razors? They completely disagreed. To them, it wasn’t a badge of honour; it was an annoying, skin-irritating, mandatory daily chore.
Be careful what you wish for
This exact dynamic plays out across every layer of adult life. We treat major milestones like destinations, completely forgetting that they are actually just continuous loops of regimented maintenance.
The corporate promotion: The junior executive envies the director who gets to sit in closed-door strategy meetings and make big calls. They fight for years to get the title. Then they arrive, only to find out that ‘making big calls’ just means managing endless political fires, checking spreadsheets at midnight, and carrying a heavy, permanent baseline of systemic stress.
The scale up: The freelancer dreams of building an agency. They want a big office and a payroll of twenty people because it looks ‘successful.’ When they get it, they realise they no longer do the creative work they loved; they are now just a full-time HR manager and a collection agent operating a high-pressure cash-flow machine.
The routine mess: If I neglect my shaving routine for just a few days, it turns into a total mess. It becomes a genuine pain to clean up. The routine isn’t there because it’s glamourous; it’s there because the alternative is chaos.
The sovereign realignment
The amateur seeks milestones because they want to be seen achieving them. The sovereign operator evaluates milestones based on whether they actually want to manage the daily, unglamorous maintenance routine that comes with them.
Before you sprint toward the next level, ask yourself the hard question: Do I actually want the prize, or am I just envying someone else’s chore?
Love yourself. Keep jabbering.
