Eat Sleep Drink Dream – Flipping Work and Life For A Year

I don’t often write about personal things here, but the two most-read posts of this past year were Mastering The Rudiments, about my journey with learning the drums, and Unretirement, a personal reflection on my career.

I wrote both of those back in May – a shoulder month between seasons. In May, the year hasn’t hardened into disappointment or routine, there’s still time to change course. Now that the year has passed, I’ve found myself wanting to Think Out Loud a bit, in particular about a goal I set for myself this year. In “Unretirement” I explained that after seven companies, I had decided to get off the startup train for good: “As any founder can tell you, being in charge of millions of dollars of invested capital and scores of trusting employees is exhausting.” What I didn’t mention was that I promised myself I’d not commit to anything full time – no new startup, to be sure, but also, no project of any kind that would dominate my time and warp reality in its wake. My goal was to simply…be.

Twelve months in, I find myself wondering: How’d that go? And, what, if anything, has changed?

***

I’ve been doing basically one thing for 35 years – starting companies. And even as I did that, I was manically spackling in projects like writing books, joining boards, investing in other startups, teaching, and running conferences. For most of the past few decades I was so damn busy that the world narrowed into an overburdened to-do list. The high priority items on that list – “Raise the B round” or “Close General Motors” – seemed so damn important that a lot of “life” got pushed to the periphery. Over time the non-work portion of life, even if dutifully minded and enjoined, well, it gets relegated. Yes, I have to go to the gym. Yes, I will call or possibly even visit my mother, who aged from a young 55 to a spry 90 over the course of my career. Yes, I will be at the soccer game, the birthday party, the parent-teacher meeting. But was I really there? I honestly can’t remember. In fact, one of the most remarkable things I’ve come to realize about the past few decades is how little of it I can actually recall. What the fuck is that about?

Oddly, the things I remember best are the parties. The time spent with family and friends where I let go, usually aided by liberal doses of alcohol and other social lubricants. Booze in particular became something of a short-term work-release program – I drank nearly every night, and damn, I got pretty good at it. Over the past year I had a good, long look at that crutch, and I’ll admit, it’s taken the better part of twelve months to change my relationship to it. If you’ve never Googled “How do I know I’m an alcoholic,” reviewed the Internet’s cold counsel, and quietly consigned uncomfortable truths to the darkest corner of your mind, well, good on you. I did a lot of that over the years.

So some things have changed. I didn’t stop drinking cold turkey this year, and despite America’s bipolar love affair with quitting, I don’t plan on joining that particular club. But I have built a more adult relationship with drinking. Post summer, I cut my intake roughly in half. I’m even trying to be entirely dry the first half of the week. So yeah, that’s a change. It helps that I’m no longer in a job that requires constant travel or going out nearly every night. It’s far harder to change when your colleagues are getting shitfaced at the same table as you.

As long as we’re getting personal, how I sleep, dream, and eat also changed this past year. I’m addicted to exercise – I rarely miss a day, and when I do I obsessively increase my workouts on either side of the break. But I’ve always felt I was carrying just a bit too much weight – the NIH body mass index put me just on the wrong side of “Overweight.” Sure, I could justify this as not accounting for muscle mass over fat, but that felt a lot like my justifications around alcohol. So I stopped eating in the morning – and got in the habit of preparing a good lunch at midday. We kept dinner pretty much the same. Presto, I went from 195 to 183 pounds in just a few months. The NIH now puts me comfortably inside “Normal.” I’m not sure why that NIH score matters to me, but it does. As one ages – a topic for another post – one tends to grow thicker. I wanted to buck that trend.

***

Early drafts of this post included hundreds more words on changes to my sleep habits, including a dip into the rabbit hole of dreams. But I started this post writing about work, about my decision to not commit to a full time project, and somehow ended up writing about drinking, eating and sleeping. Perhaps that’s the point – I’ve always sensed that my priorities were a bit mixed up, but during the course of this year, I finally felt what it meant to shift them around.

As I said at the top, I gave myself this entire year to reflect, to consider who and where I was in the world, and to not be driven by some all-encompassing Company or Project. Instead, I hoped to identify some things I wanted to change, perhaps finding new things I wanted to try along the way. Back in January a year seemed an appropriate amount of time given the work at hand. But it went…very quickly, and standing at the precipice of 2024, I can’t say I’ve come as far as I wished.

But the progress is there – by the numbers, certainly, and in the new habits I’ve picked up. Beyond the personal, my work has changed significantly. Before I left my last company I’d work at least 8-10 hours a day, often squeezing in an hour or two after dinner, and another hour in the midnight interregnum. These past few months I’ve averaged 6-8 hours, and that’s absolutely how it’s going to stay from now forward.

It’s taken an entire career to realize the obvious: The things that work makes possible are, in fact, the things that matter the most. What happens, I’m starting to wonder, if I relegate work, instead of the rest of life?

***

Yet still I work, and I enjoy it, most of the time. In the past few months I’ve picked up a number of new projects. The most significant is my recent commitment to Northeastern, where I’m attached both to the Burnes Center and the School of Journalism. I’m teaching a course on innovation in journalism business models, as well as doing research at Burnes on the history and possible futures of the Internet.

That research will most likely turn into a book of some kind – but I’ll keep the details of that project for another post. I’m also advising a number of projects in both the non-profit and for-profit world, as well as helping to stand up a new kind of gathering at the intersection of science, medicine, and longevity. I continue my work with P&G on Signal, which has been the longest running partnership of my career, and I keep my hand in media and tech through my board work with Sovrn and LiveRamp. No matter what I’m doing, I plan on writing out loud here, as much as I possibly can. I know long-form posting is passé, but to be honest, writing these posts is the best part of “work.” Thanks for coming along for the ride.

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