Drop the ball.
Why you should let things slide into chaos every once in a while.
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I was sitting in the fancy office of a multiple-exit founder as she let me in on a secret: the reason she’d been successful was because she had, on many occasions, deliberately dropped the ball.
“You mean this…” I skeptically gestured to the hundreds of employees buzzing about her immaculately styled office, “…this all came about because you dropped the ball?”
“That’s right” she responded, “I had to let things slide so that I could scale. In business there are too many balls to catch, at some point you have to let a few of them drop.”
In that moment, as someone whose identity was tied to being able to manage a million things at once, I felt personally attacked. A tight lipped smile appeared on my face as I secretly told myself her advice was ridiculous (bordering on idiotic) and that no, letting emails go un-answered, calls go un-returned and tasks go un-actioned could not possibly be the way.
Turns out the only idiot sitting in that immaculately styled office was me.
Building a business is a juggling act. To be honest, even living as a fully functioning adult is too. It’s the act of juggling your own needs with the needs of your restless children, aging parents, loving partner and frustratingly needy pets.
It’s juggling the demands on your time and deciding whether to prioritise your health or career or hobbies or learning or relationships or passions or creativity or making money or finding love or all of it or none at all.
It’s wrestling over decisions: should I or shouldn’t I, dig deep or let go, pursue or relent, stop or go.
It’s making trade offs between health and indulgence, money and learning, happiness and suffering, struggle and growth.
It’s letting go of shiny objects to grab hold of dazzling ones. It’s forcing yourself to ditch perfection to allow new doors to open. It’s allowing things to get messy every once in a while even though messy equals loose ends. Even though messy equals chaos. Even though messy means letting go of control.
No one can keep everything spick and span at all times and the most successful people know the desperate impossibility of having it all, doing it all and being it all. They know that not every email can be answered and not every missed call can be returned. They recognise entropy as a precursor to greatness. They constantly ask themselves: what chaos will I choose to live with today?
The brightest among us know that the skill isn’t in keeping all of your balls in the air.
The skill is in knowing which ones to let fall.
🎧 Listen instead
👀 When was the last time you let things slide into chaos?
And did things turn out as badly as you thought?
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Well said, loved this piece! Sometimes the poison also holds the antidote.
It’s so interesting when your view of how someone got successful gets dashed with reality. We create a story in our heads that they must have done this or that, or sacrifice here and there. We then strive and measure ourselves against this imaginary yardstick of our making.
The juggling reminded me of the audiobook by Gary Keller “The ONE thing” he says about juggling, “Understanding the distinction between glass and rubber balls is the essence of effective time and energy management. By focusing our efforts on safeguarding the glass balls—the core elements of our well-being and purpose—we prioritize what truly matters. We resist the temptation to be consumed by the constant busyness of life and instead devote our attention to what is essential.” Basically that some balls can be dropped and it will bounce back, but some, like family relationships and our well being should always be prioritised.