Contrary to popular belief, you can’t have it all. At least not all at once.
A couple of weeks ago, my co-founder Mackenzie and I were on a Zoom call with our then acquaintance, and now friend, Raghu.
Raghu is an integrative and addiction psychiatrist, psychotherapist, neuroscientist, mental health advocate, author and social entrepreneur. Not enough? He’s also super nice, easy to talk to and incredibly generous.
On our Zoom call, I mentioned that I’d be tagging along on my husband’s work trip to San Francisco the following week and, given that’s where he’s based, I’d love to meet while we were in town. Instead of just saying sure, let’s get together, he said sure, let’s get together and… let me introduce you to some of the people in my network who also work in the addiction recovery space.
With less than a week’s notice, he put together a dinner of a dozen or so folks working at different layers of the recovery ecosystem including clinicians, care coordinators, interventionists, coaches and community builders. Collectively, this group is focused not just on “treatment,” but on how healing and recovery actually work in real life across families, systems and communities.
Mackenzie, who had no intention of making a cross country trip with less than a week’s notice, decided to join me and that dinner catalyzed a full few days of discussions about Hello Steady and innovation in recovery more broadly.
We ate great food (shoutout Wildseed and Xica), got to take our first Waymo ride (mind blowing) and went on a nice 11 mile run to the Golden Gate Bridge (we’re training for a 50K ultramarathon and, if you’re in the Northeast, you know what an absolute luxury running outside without 18 layers is).
But getting the opportunity to connect with some pretty awesome new friends and collaborators was, of course, the highlight of it all.
When Carl and I got home at 3AM on Saturday morning, I realized that if I didn’t write something for my Substack that day, I’d break the streak I had publicly posted about on my LinkedIn. 🤦🏼♀️
But, rather than post something uninspired just to achieve an arbitrary goal I hadn’t even really meant to set for myself, I decided to let it go and prioritize a day of rest. For one, I don’t think anyone cares whether or not I’m actually posting once a week. And two, sometimes you have to sacrifice something (or a few things) in order to meaningfully give your energy to something else. That something else was being completely present and engaged on our trip.
“Letting go” is not something I do easily, but it helped that I had capped off the week by listening to a recent episode of the Trailhead Podcast on How to Be Excellent Without Burning Out. In it, they read a quote from guest Brad Stulberg’s newest book:
There are plenty of lifestyle and happiness gurus who espouse balance above all else. There are also plenty of motivational speakers who say you must always be obsessed to succeed. But the truth is more nuanced. In this context, balance means you never go all in. Obsession means you recklessly go all in. Prioritization means you go all in, but not on autopilot, and not in a way that ruins your physical, emotional or relational health.
Practically that means it’s completely absurd to believe that you can be a great business owner or employee while also being a great athlete, and a great parent, and a great friend, and a writer, or musician, or artist or content creator who never has to eat processed food or swing by a drive-through because you’ve also meticulously grocery shopped and meal prepped in a kitchen that you’ve managed to keep super tidy. It’s just. not. possible.
I often hear people talk about prioritization as a juggling act. Some of the balls we’re juggling are plastic and some are glass.1 Glass balls can’t be dropped, but plastic ones can. Sometimes we have to let the plastic balls drop. And sometimes that hurts, because maybe we love those plastic balls (grow up 😉).
But going all in on one thing means you’ve likely gotta drop something else. Mackenzie and I are all in on Hello Steady and on a daily basis we’re deciding which balls are plastic and which are glass.
Being fully present in SF? A glass ball, duh.
Posting weekly on Substack? A plastic ball, easy to drop.
Our former careers? Tricky. I’d say plastic balls that looked like glass.
Amazingly, the balls can transform from day to day. A glass ball today might be a plastic ball tomorrow. For example, exercise and getting enough sleep overall are glass balls. But there are going to be days we have to be on red eye flights or out late and up early to avoid dropping a bigger glass ball.
Anyway, the point is that having it all, all at once, is a giant myth. We all need to be juggling multiple balls because that’s what comprises our identity and it’s how we find meaning and purpose, but they don’t always need to be in the air at the same time.
When I started writing this piece, I thought it was going to be more about community and the idea of growth not happening in isolation, but I’ll have to save that for another post.
For now, if you’ve got too many plastic balls in the air, maybe let one drop. You can always pick it back up later.
Love,
Em
This analogy can be attributed to Nora Roberts.
So well-written! Thanks.