It's my birthday week! What should I do? My schedule has outpaced me twice-over and the idea of setting aside time to celebrate was giving me stress hives. With "so much to do" I didn't feel like I'd earned any more time off (i.e. rest).

What do I want for my birthday? To feel good. Healthy. Whole. Rested. Happy. To feel the opposite of how this world asks me to feel in the face of uncertainty. My approach may not feel relatable to you -but since leaning into the reality that my neuroatypicality is my superpower, these exercises help me tremendously.

This is a version of the Wheel of Life (or life balance wheel, coaching wheel, etc) and it's used to assess one's life balance and to target where more investment could make big waves. Last year, I completed a health / life alignment with Hannah Easterly of HOMEbody Wellness and this illustration was a pillar in her process. At the start of the program, I laid out the skew of my lifestyle by scoring the prevalence of each of these elements.

Turns out, I’d been sacrificing quite a few of these to the grinding overwhelm of a select few.

Reflecting on life around my birthday is nothing new but planning an entire week of birthday celebration, reflection, and nurturing is the start of a new tradition. This wheel inspired me to:

invite some friends out to a swanky local bowling hall
schedule my first Mysore (yoga) class since the start of the pandemic
set aside scheduled time for baking bread, hanging up some art, and caring for my indoor plantscape
put rest boundaries in place and communicate them with my loved ones

…and front-load what would’ve been “weekend work” to give myself three glorious, unhustled days of rest.

So yes, that last bit does mean I’ll grind harder for these next few days (nothing new). But at least I know why and what I’m looking forward to.

The content that follows gets heady, stream-of-conscious, and meandering. But, I left it as an experiment.

Proceed at your leisure and drop a comment if you feel compelled.

Is hustling inevitable in today’s ecosystem?

As an innovator and a perpetually self-employed person, I reflect on this often. The general pace of life continues to accelerate whether or not it is ethical, sustainable, or productive. And those who can keep up and even sprint ahead see gains — that’s capitalism. Going broad in my consideration doesn’t help, though; not if I want to make an impact today.

The reality is that as I age, my boundaries reflecting what I will and will not accept in my life circumstantially are calcifying — notably without much conscious decision making involved.

I scoff at unpaid internships (unethical), rebuff payment in “exposure” (unsustainable), and state clearly what can be expected from a given time frame or scope of limitation (not always productive in the eyes of the manager). My opinions in these areas slip from my lips as casually as regurgitated memes and movie quotes if I’m not careful.

Yet, my aversion to hustling hasn’t correlated so much with less work or productivity, at least not from the volume perspective — it’s fostered a fertile environment for self, skill, and sense development that I still don’t fully understand.

Hustling, overworking, under earning, underrespecting myself; it filled me with fear, doubt, fatigue, and apathy. From that apathy spread a self-preservation so strong, I stopped being myself. The person who can create time from a deficit, who can find a way out of figurative rockslide in the dark, who can deploy the muscles it takes to hustle in a strategic, skillful way. A way with a beginning and an end, metrics and meaning.

Who can struggle and suffer for a purpose, knowing this too shall pass.

For the time being, I’ll say yes, hustling is inevitable* to reach exceeds-expectations level success.

Everything that flows and changes has equilibrium. There we can exist with few to moderate sways in a role that grants us balance on a bound spectrum. On either edge of that spectrum lie the extremes — bigger risks, bigger gains, bigger jumps, bigger falls. If equilibrium is the status quo and our sights are set beyond, the only logical answer is to hustle.

Armed with that perspective, I’m asking myself a question that harkens an analogy about eating cake (and having it too) —