the work trifecta

Grey’s Anatomy was my favorite show when I was a teenager, and it’s still one of my « comfort » shows. It initially made me want to become a surgeon, and every once in a while it made me regret to not have gone that way. But that’s another story.

Over the years I’ve wondered why I loved the show so much, even after I decided to not go to med school. And I always came back to how passionate, how busy, how obsessed they are with their work, and I really wanted that for myself. I wanted to find that _thing_ that I couldn’t stay away from and that I would love so much that I’d work 100-hour weeks without a second thought.

Now that I’m (slightly) older, I’ve realised two things.

You very rarely start your career with passion: some people are passionate about what they do from the get go, but for me it’s definitely something that has grown over time, and that is still growing, led mainly by my curiosity.

The triangle of working hard/working smart/success is a tricky one.

I am convinced that you need to work hard to be successful — it doesn’t just fall into your lap. But there is definitely more to it than the endless days. 
During the fall/winter of 2021, I worked longer hours than ever before, with no days off, to launch the dairy project that I’d been working for the past 2 years. But instead of feeling bad ass, living the type of work life that I’d been dreaming about, I was miserable. In the end, I wasn’t efficient in the way I worked and I didn’t accomplish much during that time.

Now, it was « only » for a few months, so maybe it wasn’t long enough to see the results. But prior to that, I was already working quite a bit, or at least it felt like it, with little « productive » down time (where I was actually resting) because I felt so guilty about taking time off with all the things to do and all the people working on the farm.

That workload suddenly decreased in January 2022 because of some administrative issues we ran into, and I’ve taken the time for the past few months to figure out the mistakes I made in 2021, so that I could avoid them in the future. My conclusion is that I was way in over my head. It wasn’t so much the workload, even though it was a big one: I couldn’t prioritize properly, I got overwhelmed and just spiraled down, way quicker and way deeper than I would every have expected, and that’s not something that I wish to repeat.

Yes, I want the relentless passion and the determination and the fire that you see from the Grey’s characters. But what’s the point if I’m not actually enjoying any of it?

My current view on the trifecta is this: to be successful, you need to work hard and you need to be smart about it. But those two things don’t guarantee any success, so you actually have to enjoy your process. And there is no magic formula for it: you have to figure out what works for you. Other people’s processes are interesting in terms of inspiration, but no one is quite like you, so chances are your process and routines will be different. So take the time, think about it, experiment, figure it out.