You’re Not Tired. You’re Misaligned.
New York City. 2020. Sitting on the steps of a church I’d never been inside, with nowhere I had to be for the next hour. That almost never happened.
A month prior, my investor had bailed. COVID had just hit and he got scared. The business I’d been building had maybe weeks of runway left, and I’d spent that month running on nothing but full throttle.
By the time I sat down on those steps, I’d already asked myself every version of “what’s my next move” there was to ask.
I remember looking out at the street and feeling something I couldn’t name right away. Not worried. Not planning. Just tired.
Not the kind of tired that sleep fixes. The kind that shows up when you’ve been running so hard for so long that you no longer know what you’re running from — or to.
My first move was to do what I always did. Sprint. And yeah… that produces results, but it rarely fulfills meaningful objectives. The world has changed. What used to work on effort alone now required something different. More creativity. More intention. More actual strategy. I had to stop running long enough to build one.
That was the moment I started asking a different question. Not “how do I work harder” or even “how do I become more productive” — but *what am I actually trying to build here?*
Looking back, I — like most of us men — was using an outdated playbook and carrying it into the second half of my life.
Work harder. Push longer. Sacrifice now, live later. But those sacrifices start to cost you things that you can’t get back. Time. Presence. Parts of your life you didn’t realize you were trading until they were gone.
There comes a point where the strategy stops fitting the man. The weight you feel isn’t weakness. It’s what happens when you’re running full speed in a direction you chose before you knew who you were. Before you discovered and designed your purposes.
You were trying to make more money, build some sort of business — but you weren’t trying to create a life.
A life where you were harmoniously caring for all of your professional, financial, and personal purposes. A good life. A dignified life.
You don’t need more discipline.
You need a different strategy.
— Eric Davis
Responses
The pandemic times literally brought me to my knees. They hit exactly when I was moving from one country to another. I had a plan and the resources, and then overnight, I suddenly had nothing. I was stuck in a rented room in an apartment shared with three other strangers, the only thing I could afford, jobless, with only enough money for food and rent to last a few weeks. At that moment, a full-on sprint was my only option. I took any job available back then, even if it was poorly paid and only for a few weeks.
The exhaustion following that sprint was immense. Once the worst of the crisis passed, I realized that a change of strategy was necessary.
It turned out that THE FIRST PREREQUISITE for a strategy shift is CHANGING MY OWN MINDSET:
One of the biggest changes I’ve become fully aware of is that the exhaustion, which had lasted for years even before the pandemic, is gone. It vanished the moment I realized that PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL LIFE are not only not mutually exclusive, but they aren’t even meant to just exist side by side. THEY ARE TWO PARTS OF ONE ENTITY THAT COMPLEMENT EACH OTHER. Exhaustion has been replaced by a long-lost zest for life, even when things don’t go exactly as one would hope sometimes.
Only then could I move forward. I have worked as an employee my entire life. But IF I WANT TO ACHIEVE MORE FOR MYSELF AND OTHERS, I HAVE TO TAKE A DIFFERENT PATH. I found a better job and better housing, but it’s not where I want to spend the rest of my life. It’s a nice setup that currently gives me the stability for my continued growth. It is not my final goal, it is just one step on my path upward.
I’m enjoying this new strategy every single day. I’m continuing to learn, explore, and build new paths, knowledge, and skills. I feel that if I stick with it, it will take me somewhere I never could have reached without this insight.
Marie — this is one of the most powerful things I’ve read in a long time. The shift you’re describing, from survival sprint to strategic growth, is something most people never make. They either stay in sprint mode until they break, or they collapse and never get back up. You did neither. You rebuilt from the ground up and changed the lens you see everything through. That takes real courage. Keep going. You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.
Thank you, Eric. Without your help, this journey wouldn’t have been possible. I would have ended up exactly as you describe: trying over and over again to achieve something that has no chance of succeeding, until I collapsed.
Perhaps the most fundamental change for me was learning to understand that it is not necessary to sacrifice professional life for personal life, or vice versa. Instead of another sprint, I took a step back and started perceiving my personal life and my health as well. I realized that I could allow myself some time to rest and gain perspective. I changed my attitude toward myself. I enjoy my life, which in turn has an impact on my professional life as well, because I have the energy and space to try new things.
These days I am fully immersed in my new path, focusing on everything that needs to be done for a new start, as well as how to organize the preparation. In the past, I would have just jumped into something like this, maybe with passion (or maybe I should say with some kind of enthusiasm), but without thinking. That is, if it had even occurred to me to do such a thing.
Thank you!
I hate to admit it that I have fallen in to a victim mind set. Knowing that I need to sprint. A lot of the time I can get up to sprint after something and may even achieve it, to then stop and look for the next shiny object or the next guru, IT IS EXHAUSTING!. I had one of my biggest deals close last year and I thought it was going to change me and it didn’t . It feels like going deep into something and staying has always been a challenge and it leads to a lot of time wasted by switching course.
So the conversation around be more strategic really hits home.
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