Earlier this year, I emailed a friend of mine in London to ask if I could take him out for coffee to get some advice about running a successful business.
I expected a lot of things going in, but I was not prepared for the only bit of advice I actually received.
Get therapy, he said.
This businessperson is a friend, so he was aware of some of my past issues with depression, insomnia, a tendency towards workaholism, and debilitating anxiety. He had, in the past, been a recipient of text messages carrying apologies for not being somewhere I said I would be because of not “feeling well,” a code I’m sure he’s come to understand.
When I had asked for advice, I wanted strategic growth tips and advice on networking better, not a critique of my lifestyle. But he was relentless.
“You cannot a build a business when you’re constantly crashing,” he said. “Your mind is your greatest asset in business. You cannot achieve your true potential when it’s constantly under attack.”
When it became clear to him, over several months, that I had no intention of taking his advice, he’d get pissed off, sometimes frustrated. He pushed me to take small actions instead—eight hours of sleep a night, drink sufficient water, exercise three times a week. I started implementing this advice, slowly at first, with more gusto as time went on, and found my career changing. In the first month that I got eight hours of sleep a night, every night, my revenue doubled. I wrote this off as a coincidence, except that two months later, when I fell back into my pattern of working until 2am again, my monthly income dropped back to its original number.
I don’t know why I resisted my friend’s advice about fixing my personal life and habits so much. Because for many years, I’d been saying similar things.
In the last five years, when young professionals have asked me how to succeed as a freelancer, I’ve often found myself saying that their biggest decisions would be personal as much as they would professional. Their families, especially if they came from traditional cultures, would impact their decision-making. As a woman born and brought up in India, my family had a say in who I could or could not become and when I chose to go beyond what was expected of me and left home, it all but wrecked my career.
Who they dated and possibly married would make a massive difference, I told my young students. When and how many children they chose to have would matter. How they raised those children and the goals they set for their parenting would matter, too. I didn’t want to leave my child behind as I traveled for journalism assignments and so my freelancing career and my sources of income changed considerably after my son was born.
This wasn’t always advice that was well received, so I was thrilled when I discovered Sheryl Sandberg—her TED talks, her book—and found that this was exactly the advice she was giving to women. I read about Sandberg’s relationship to her now-deceased husband and found that, like her, I’d been lucky enough to have found a spouse who was extremely supportive of my career and of my life choices and who pushed me to be better than I thought I could be.
When I first met Sam, despite having been a successful freelancer for many years, I was penniless and unfocused. Between funding a broke ex-boyfriend’s travel assignments and moving cities randomly and repeatedly in an attempt to regroup when it all ended, I had depleted my reserves, both emotionally and financially.
When I met Sam, he lifted me up with a lot of understanding but also tough love, telling me it was unreasonable to spend more than two days on an assignment that paid only $300. He rolled his eyes when I procrastinated on work and acted like an artist instead of the serious professional I wanted to be. He made me hold my ground when all I wanted to do was chicken out. He emailed me constantly with story ideas that I could sell to editors I worked with, even landing me my first break with The New York Times. When I surrendered to the urge to go off for two months and start another book that he knew I wouldn’t finish, he would gently steer me back into the real world, reminding me that every time I stopped making money, I stopped believing in myself.
More than anything else, he had my back. And he made sure I knew it.
I now understand that what Sam was doing was showing me how true love really works.
Love isn’t only about the giving; it’s also about the taking. For the first time in my life, I was becoming comfortable with the taking.
The give. And the take. That is love. That is life with another person.
It is in that balance that I started achieving true success and fulfillment in my work.
It took me several years to notice that very soon after I met Sam, my ambition—sleepwalking after having been run down after a particularly bad relationship—was suddenly reawakened. Despite the fact that I took more time off during that first year of our courtship than I ever had before, my income exploded. And I realized—shockingly—that the years I had been in bad relationships, my career had taken a downturn, my income and confidence both going south with it.
One of my mentors, a woman whose husband left her almost a million dollars in debt with back taxes, has found in her research that women who have consistent six-figure incomes have very little drama in their personal lives. This is not a new concept. In his book The Millionaire Next Door, Thomas J. Stanley found that the average millionaire in America is not only married, but stays married to the same person. It’s not difficult to see why. A long-term spouse who has your back gives you more than just support you can count on; they give you freedom from all the drama that comes with conflict-ridden relationships.
Who you marry is a decision that will have a significant impact on your career.
The personal is not distinct from the professional. The sleep, the exercise, the water, the stability of a loving relationship—these seem like little things that fall in the personal realm, that have no bearing on our careers, but the more I speak to successful businesspeople, the more books on entrepreneurship I read, the more I find these basic truths coming up repeatedly.
Sleeping eight hours a night as a strategy for success is not the sexy image of writing or entrepreneurship that we like to see. We want to hear about the all-nighters, the failings, the big risk-taking, the adventure.
But the sleep, the exercise, the stability is what makes that adventure possible. It’s what keeps you sane when the failing happens. It allows you to pull off those all-nighters because you’re not burned out and depleted beyond repair.
I realized that my friend was right. My mind was my biggest asset and it was a wise business investment to keep it sharp and worry-free. I decided, finally, to work on that.
Have you, too, been giving up daily sanity as a means to achieve writing success?
How much more successful could you be if you didn’t?