Built by You

“When you truly work for yourself, you won’t have hobbies, you won’t have weekends, and you won’t have vacations, but you won’t have work either.” —Naval

What Naval said above is so true. I’m a long-time subscriber to his newsletter (Naval Podcast), and recently he started posting again in mid-July. I recently started a passion project called Huskvarnas Kattvakt, and as part of this project, I’m blessed with customers and I take care of cats almost every day of the week. My hobbies are on hold. All of a sudden, I don’t have weekends anymore. My June summer vacation in Spain became a fantastic time for me to set everything up (that’s when the cat-sitting idea came alive). And I suppose I will be more than happy to sacrifice my future vacations for the cats. I also hold a full-time job that I love.

And here’s the thing. The cats ARE my hobby. They ARE my vacation. Yes, it’s lots of hard work traveling to them, but the exertion is worth it. Every cat I visit is free therapy for me. They make my heart glad, and at the end of the fur-covered day, I’m productive in the most meaningful way.

I want to end my pondering with the passage taken also from Naval’s most recent post:

If you’re doing something that’s truly yours, you care very deeply so you can’t turn it off. And that’s the curse of the entrepreneur. But the benefit of the entrepreneur is that if you’re doing it right, if you’re doing it for the right reasons or the right people in the right way, and if you can set aside the stress of not hitting your goals, which is real and hard to set aside, then it doesn’t feel like work.

And that’s when you’re most productive. […]

[…] You get what look like huge negatives to the average person that you don’t have weekends, you don’t have vacations, and you don’t have time off, you don’t have work-life balance. But, at the same time, when you are working, it doesn’t feel like work. It’s something that you’re highly motivated to do and that’s the reward.