There is a moment in every business inevitably where it feels like you have built a cage for yourself. You are going nonstop. You wake up thinking about a list of things to do and you go to bed knowing there are more to do tomorrow. You don't have a work addiction, it's like if you do not keep moving, everything will come crashing down around you. The whole thing relies on you. Every decision comes full circle back to your desk. And you are not trying to control everything, you just want to keep it going.
I genuinely believed that was how it is supposed to be for far too long. I thought it was ok and that is how I am supposed to do it. I thought that if I let go of one single aspect, the quality would suffer or the momentum would stop. I thought that nobody else would care about it the way that I do, and perhaps they would not. But caring and doing it all yourself were not the same thing. And I had to learn that the hard way.
I think it changed when I started to include people who didn't just take direction and follow direction. The kind of people who never asked what to do next, they just saw it and then did it. I stopped delegating like a check listing and started to talk about things that matter. This is what we're creating. This is why it matters and it changed the energy. Things started to change, without me having to change them. Some things were even better than I could have done it myself.
It's a weird feeling to hand off. You feel like you are walking away from something that's fragile. But unless you set it up wrong, it's not going to break. It will bend and it will grow in a way that makes it finally able to include other people instead of only relying on them.
I started to feel the pressure come off here and the work began to organize itself without me needing to touch every lever.
