This morning, my cousin and lifelong soul sister, Kerrie, sent me a podcast featuring Elizabeth Gilbert.
She said she thought it might resonate with me.
She was right.
Gilbert talked about taking time away from creating. What I took from the conversation was simple:
The world kept going when she stopped.
I sat with that thought for a while.
Because for most of my adult life, I’ve been the person who does.
I know how to work. How to build. How to solve problems. How to figure things out when there isn’t an obvious answer.
I’ve built a career helping people make important decisions. I’ve built Momentus. I’ve learned things I never imagined I’d need to know.
And when something isn’t working, my instinct is to figure out what’s missing and make it better.
I love that part of me.
But lately, I’ve been noticing something else.
How easily helping people can become carrying things that were never entirely mine to carry.
How naturally I say yes.
How often I continue thinking about someone else’s problem long after the conversation has ended.
And how little attention I sometimes leave for myself.
I don’t think I ever deliberately chose that.
It just became a familiar way of moving through life.
Being useful felt natural. Being needed felt familiar.
And somewhere along the way, I think I started confusing those things with my value.
When being needed becomes who you are
I wonder how many business owners recognize themselves in this.
You’re the person everyone calls.
The one who remembers the details. The one who catches what gets missed. The one who makes the decision when nobody else knows what to do.
You build the company. You take care of the customers. You look after the people who depend on you.
And there’s pride in that.
There should be.
But something can happen when you become the person everyone relies on.
You begin to believe that if you’re not doing, solving, helping, or producing, you’re somehow falling short.
So you keep going.
Even when you’re tired.
Even when you’d rather be doing something else.
Even when the person who needs your attention the most is you.
I’ve been thinking about how much of that comes from responsibility and how much comes from a belief that we need to keep earning our place.
Because those are two very different things.
The business needs you. But you need you too.
One of the things I believe deeply is that the owner should not be the operating system.
I’ve spent years thinking about that from a business perspective.
How do we build companies that don’t require the owner to remember everything, approve everything, and personally rescue every process that breaks?
How do we create enough structure that a business can function without consuming the person who built it?
But this morning, I realized there’s another side to that belief.
The owner deserves a life that doesn’t depend on how much they can carry.
We can care deeply about our work without making it our entire identity.
We can help people without being responsible for every outcome.
We can be generous and still have boundaries.
We can love building something and still need time when we’re building nothing at all.
And we can be valuable even when nobody needs anything from us.
Learning the difference between my work and my worth
I still have responsibilities. I still have goals. I still want to create meaningful things.
But I’m beginning to understand that those things describe what I do.
They don’t determine who I am.
Earlier this week, while driving, I heard a scene from a movie where one character kept asking another a simple question.
“Who are you?”
And the answers kept coming back to what he did for a living.
But that wasn’t the question.
I remember thinking about how easily we do that.
We describe ourselves by our work, our accomplishments, and the responsibilities we carry.
But what about the person underneath all of that?
I found myself wondering how I would answer that question. And whether I could answer it without mentioning anything I’ve accomplished.
I don’t need to become the best builder, the most successful business owner, or the person with the answer to every problem to deserve peace in my own life.
And I don’t need another accomplishment before I’m allowed to feel good about the person I’ve become.
That’s something I’m still learning.
I haven’t mastered it.
There are days when I still say yes too quickly. Days when I take on more than I should. Days when I feel that familiar pull to do one more thing, solve one more problem, or make something else better.
But I’m starting to notice those moments.
And maybe that awareness is where change begins.
The person underneath it all
What I keep coming back to is that I don’t want to stop caring.
I don’t want to lose my curiosity, my love of building, or my desire to help people.
Those are parts of me that I treasure.
I just want to make sure there’s enough of me left to enjoy the life I’m creating.
I want to trust myself a little more.
To recognize when something is mine to carry and when it isn’t.
To make room for the parts of my life that don’t need to be productive, useful, or turned into something bigger.
And to discover who I am when I’m not trying to accomplish anything at all.
Maybe this is a question worth asking if you’re an owner, a leader, a parent, a caregiver, or simply someone who’s spent much of your life showing up for everybody else.
Who are you when you’re not the person fixing something?
I’m not sure I have the complete answer yet.
But for the first time in a long time, I’m giving myself permission to find out.