The Man Who Mistook His Job For A Life

You know how it is when you've got an endless stream of things to do and not enough time to do them...

I see this all the time with my clients: back to back meetings and calls from 8am to 8pm. An email inbox with thousands of unopened messages. Barely time to break for more coffee or a bite to eat. Finishing the day feeling exhausted but not sure that any substantial progress has been made on what really matters.

Back when I was living that life, feeling overloaded and sometimes overwhelmed, I would force a break between meetings, leave my office and take a short walk round the block. Often I detoured for a quick browse in a local book store before heading back to my desk.

At the time it felt like a form of escapism and I suppose it was. I just needed to get off the treadmill for a few minutes and clear my head a bit.

And although stepping away from work when you’ve got a ton of stuff to do doesn’t feel like the right way to crack on with your to-do list, I'd actually discovered a valuable technique. The ‘$1,000 break’.

The $1,000 break is a powerful way to get unstuck and move forward: a short change of scene coupled with some simple physical activity.

For many of us, a short break from work is clicking another tab on our browser to check the stock market or sports news. Or maybe a quick peek at social media on our phone. These are ‘$1 breaks’. Cheap and easy but they don’t provide real value.

The power of the $1,000 break is the mental re-boot that comes from a substantial shift into another mental space. The physical activity has the effect of clearing the mental air because you're using a different part of the brain.

Walking round the block - or even getting away from your desk to make a cup of coffee - is more dependent on the regions of the brain called the basal ganglia and the cerebellum rather than the pre-frontal cortex. It's a bit like those old computers where you needed to re-boot to clear out an overloaded memory (RAM).

This refreshing of the memory banks allows new thoughts and ideas to bubble up. (You might have heard people say 'I have my best ideas in the shower'...this is the same thing happening.) The value is that you come back to your work with fresh and valuable perspectives - hence $1,000 break.

So, one day, way back when I first began to contemplate the heretical idea that I might be living the wrong life, I was on one of my $1,000 breaks having a quick sweep through the book shop near my office when one title caught my eye. I bought it on the spot.

The book was The Man Who Mistook His Job For A Life by Jonathon Lazear.

It’s an autobiographical account of a man who woke up to the fact that he had put his work ahead of his wife, children and friends. He found himself lost, burnt out and wondering why he was living this way. Eventually he got over being a workaholic and began to live a better life.

Lazear argues that people like him have to hit rock bottom before they can begin to turn their lives round. I don’t know whether I was at rock bottom when I saw the book but for me it was really helpful to know that I wasn’t the only person feeling this way.

Most importantly, the title of the book alone jolted me to start on my path to escape to a bigger life. I'd been stuck in resignation and now I could see just a glimmer of possibility. That fateful day's $1,000 break was the beginning of a very valuable journey for me.

When I first read the book I struggled to get into the details. The book goes on a lot about why it isn’t a good idea to be a workaholic but I knew that already. At the time, I was stuck in the Money trap (couldn't see another way to earn good money) and the Identity trap (it all seemed to alien to contemplate a major shift). So I couldn’t see any way of getting past being a workaholic.

Years later, with the benefit of having discovered a methodological approach to solving all this, I was able to reread this book with new eyes. Lazear rightly says your first step must be some ‘self-(re)definition’. Rushing headlong into solving without self-reflection is just a Band-Aid. It’s taken you a long time to get to where you are in your life. You need to commit yourself to the time it will take to move to whatever comes next.

Just as a $1,000 break can give you the space to boost your productivity at work, you also need space to build the bigger life that you want to live.

For me, the way I did this before I left my corporate life was to go for a run in the morning. After a quick look at my overnight emails, I would go out for a run. This gave me great space and a clear head as I began to re-evaluate my priorities for having a life not a job.

Ask yourself:

• What space can you create for tuning into the possibilities of a bigger life than the present you are living?
• What regular space will you carve out from your calendar for this?
• What would stop you from doing this?
• What's at stake if you delay?

Action: Create the space you need for your escape planning.

• Check out the Life and Legitimacy actions from my C-Suite Escape Guide to help you with your destination.
• What life will you be living 1 year, 3 years, 10 years from now?
• What new skills will you learn? How will you acquire these and when?
• What financial resources will you draw on?
• What support do you need?
• What conversations do you need to have and with whom?

Redesigning your life is a big deal but if you listen to your legitimate self carefully, you can create a broad sense of new direction quite quickly. Then you start to flesh out the key areas that you will need to work on. In the weeks and months ahead, as your plan takes shape you can begin moving to execution.