You Don’t Have to Become Someone Else

Four computer screens glow in front of me with dozens of programs open, each one demanding something else I haven’t finished yet. My youngest son sits fifteen feet away, playing a board game meant for two to four people by himself. He narrates each turn out loud, giving voices to both teams. I type another line of code, half-listening, half somewhere else.

I’ve been working fourteen-hour days again. Building, fixing, and deciding. Fifteen people rely on me now. I’m the subject matter expert, the director, one of the programmers, the salesman, the husband, the father—somehow all at once. The exhaustion isn’t just mental anymore. It’s in my bones.

I tell my wife, I just need a little more time. But who am I kidding? I’ve been saying that for twenty-five years.

Still, something is different this time. I love what I do. It’s still draining, but it’s mine. The runway’s clear now. The stars, at least for the moment, point in the same direction. Clients keep saying yes. They’re paying more than I ever thought they would because they actually believe in what we’re building. That’s amazing and humbling.

I’ve got an awesome team of people who care because I treat them how they deserved to be treated and they want to build something that matters to all of us.

For most of my life, I’ve lived under the tyranny of should.

I should work harder.
I should be more vocal.
I should already have figured this out.

We’ve all been there. My wife uses the phrase, “You need to stop shoulding on yourself.” Should, for me, dresses like progress but is really just another way I tell myself I wasn’t enough yet.

I’m learning, though, to make smaller course corrections. They’re the kind that don’t demand weeks of meditation on top of a mountain or personal reinvention. They just require steady movement. Day by day. Line by line. Decision by decision. That’s what lasting change actually looks like.

And today, I don’t need to be someone else.

It’s okay to be the guy who steps away from the screen in the middle of the day to go on a walk. It’s okay to tell one of my employees, who’s barely holding it together, to take the afternoon off and not worry about the paycheck. It’s okay to admit that I’m tired. So tired.

Being the one who “calls the shots” doesn’t mean I have to be the hero every day. It means I get to decide what kind of company we are and what kind of leader I want to be. Some days that looks like staying late and pushing through. Other days, it looks like closing the laptop, picking up the pieces of a half-played board game, and letting my son explain the rules.

Leadership, at least for me, hasn’t required me to be someone better in terms of my performance. Becoming a good leader has just required me to be more honest with myself about what I can actually do then learn to let others do the rest.

I look over at my son. He’s still playing, still giving every roll of the dice a voice. He glances up, catches me watching, and grins like it’s the easiest thing in the world to be right where he is.

Maybe it is.

And that is enough.