Twice this decade, I’ve had to learn hard lessons about “growth at all costs.”
From 2014 to 2019, I freelanced full-time. I truly enjoyed my life. The flexibility, the autonomy, the variety of projects that crossed my desk. I was happy. But about the time we started a family, I started feeling like I plateaued as a freelancer. I could see no path forward for offering the same services, to the same people, and continuing to grow.
Did I have to grow? Come to think of it, I didn’t stop to ask. I always just assumed growth, specifically in terms of “dollars earned per unit of time,” was always a thing to be measured and maximized.
So I grew. I grew by hiring people I could afford, not the people I needed to round myself out. I found myself babysitting projects, accounts, and people. I was in the business of being in business, and I no longer enjoyed it. It wasn’t long after that my wife’s work situation changed and I had to figure out health insurance.
Chasing growth had killed my love for my business, and it was a good time for a change. I took a job at a local company, as a senior web developer.
Over the past six years, I once again chased growth. Not in terms of compensation but in terms of responsibility. Senior developer to team lead, to manager, to director. I’ve learned a lot. But I loved being a developer. Diluting my day with everything else was starting to kill my love of work again.
Meanwhile: much like myself a few years prior, our owner couldn’t figure out a way to grow our business without either taking on debt, or taking on a partner, which I eventually realized was just a sales-truth euphemism for “selling the company.”
We were acquired. In some ways things got more interesting. But’s a constant squeeze for _mo_re, and life inside a team, inside a company, inside another company, inside a private equity portfolio leaves very little room for misunderstanding the mission: make number go up at all costs. EBITDA is your god now.
What have I learned?
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I love my work until I lose sight of the things I love about it: problem solving, making cool stuff, building relationships with people and helping them solve their problems.
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I don’t need to be rich. I need an income can that support my family.
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I need to learn contentment.
In the first scenario, I designed by own undoing by pursuing growth I didn’t need. In the second, I was roadside carnage in someone else’s fucked-up growth journey. Neither needed to happen.