Foreign and Familiar
Week #33
Hello! I’m Aaron Kardell. In my Sunday newsletter, I pick one random topic to go deep on and have some disparate quick hits at the end.
A few weeks ago, Kate was cleaning out a drawer and uncovered this:
I barely remember giving out this bizarre “gift certificate.” But I remember Kate asking me around that time, “Can’t you just have one weekend per month that you fully take off?”
I’ve left this gift certificate in a place for the last few weeks where I see it daily. And each time I look at it, I perceive what I’m seeing differently.
It serves as a reminder of how hard I worked to build a business. 80+ hour work weeks were the norm for 10 years.
The life I was living then feels so foreign to me now. I want to think I’m now at a place where it’s exceedingly rare to choose work over family or to work every weekend. And I’m fortunate that I don’t need to work as hard now as I was then.
Still, there are other times I look at it where I still see a near and present familiarity. I’m better at prioritizing my family, working a more sensible number of hours, and living out work-life integration in general. But one thing that I don’t think has really changed is that I don’t have an off switch. And I rarely make it through a weekend without doing some work.
I’m a changed man. But I’m still very much a work in progress.
What things in your life from years ago are similarly foreign and familiar?
This Week’s Quick Hits
In honor of one of my nieces, who’s a big David Bowie fan, here’s a brief write up on how Queen and David Bowie collaborated on making “Under Pressure.” David Bowie and Freddie Mercury never performed it live together, but here’s a video mashup of them as though they did.
Photo by Austin Curtis on Unsplash