It’s a good sweat
Why my week looks like a vacation from the outside, and what it took to get here
This is the deep end, and it's the one day of my newsletter regimen that is purely philosophical and not design related. Enjoy.
Some weeks my calendar looks like a vacation. Jiu jitsu with my co-founder in the middle of the week, pickleball for a networking event, and a business trip that, from the outside, looks a lot like... a trip (especially when I get to do fun stuff like visit Iceland's Punk Museum).
And I can feel it when family and friends look at that and get a little jealous.
I know how it sounds, getting paid to do things I’d half do for free looks like a ridiculous privilege.
But, what people see is the activity. What I live is the whole blend.
The roll, and then sitting on the mat afterward talking through a teammate issue neither of us wanted to bring up on our weekly sync. The pickleball, and then the 15 minutes on Slack before I drive home and have to record a quick feedback video before sitting down to dinner. Or the trip, and the laptop open in the hotel room after everyone else is asleep because I just had to get this idea out of my head.
The truth is, I’m never fully off and the enviable version of my week only has one half of that sentence in it.
What’s actually going on here?
The real question isn’t whether the jealousy is fair. It’s why a typical afternoon doesn’t feel like work to me, when the exact same afternoon would feel like a chore to plenty of people.
When the work lines up with what you’re innately wired to love, it stops registering as work. I feel this when I’m in the zone with a client and we’re doing the exact kind of design work I want to be doing, I’m not watching the clock. I’m annoyed when it’s time to stop. My co-founder on the mat is the same thing. He’d be there whether it was on the calendar or not.
Contrast that with my buddy Paul.
Paul works at Target. He’s pushed carts, he’s run a register, he’s worked his way up into a role with real responsibility, and he hates it. Every free hour he’s got goes to metal detecting and trading Pokémon cards, and if you’ve heard him talk about either one, you know this is not a guy who’s short on drive. He’d love to turn the metal detecting into a business.
Paul isn’t lazy, and Target isn’t a bad job, it just isn’t wired to him. Objectively, I think there are some differences between jobs like pay, work perks, etc.
But... at the core, some people fit a specific kind of work, and fit is what makes a long day feel short. It's Ikigai, minus the four-circle poster.
The sweat equity
Here’s the part the jealous version skips: the alignment is a payoff, not a starting gift. It shows up years late, and covered in sweat.
Mine was years of trying to get good clients to work with me, managing clients who were annoyed at me over delays that were waiting on their feedback. Revisions for the sake of revision. Work that was approved, done, celebrated, and then reversed because somebody showed it to their spouse. Staying up late practicing voluntarily because the work wasn’t good enough yet and I knew it.
None of that makes it into anyone’s perception. Paul sees the output of my work and recreation living harmoniously. He doesn’t see the sweat.
And if he goes for the metal detecting business, which I hope he does, he’ll be drenched in his own for years before he feels the same synchronicity between joy and work.
Which brings me to the actual point.
Alignment doesn’t remove the suffering. It lets you pick which suffering you carry, and get paid on top of it.
I still do admin. I still chase invoices (the literal kind), still read contracts, still sit through all the stuff nobody went to design school for, because it’s my company and there’s nobody to hand it to. The suffering didn’t go anywhere. I just chose the kind I’d rather have, and I’d choose it again because when I'm in the zone, it's magical.
The perk and the cost are the same event
Back to the mat, because it isn’t a perk with some work stapled to it.
My co-founder and I once had a conversation we’d both been avoiding, and it happened after an hour of intense drills and going at each other (for sport, we don't hate each other). Sweaty, gassed, filled with the kind of respect you only earn trying to choke each other, we talked through the teammate issue.
I don’t think that conversation goes the same way in a conference room.
It’s the best part of the job and the cost wrapped in one, and you don’t get to pull them apart. The fun is where the work gets done, which means the fun is never only fun.
Now flip it.
The person with the stable office job, four weeks of PTO, every federal holiday, fully off at 5, is usually not thinking about work at dinner and they’re not lying awake replaying a client call, or thinking of where the puck is going and how to get ahead of it. When they go fishing, they’re focused on the fish.
That's a real trade, and plenty of days it’s the better one. They get a coveted reward for their choice: an off switch that actually works.
Whichever life you pick, there will be some form of pain. I think the goal is to make your work and joy come from the same place. Work is still work and it comes with sweat... but it's a good sweat.
— Zach
