The Good Life and How to Get It

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When the company's needs made it seem impossible to leave
Business is very dynamic. There's no off switch, as you well know. But honestly, nothing pops to mind, storywise, about times when it seemed impossible to leave the business, and that fact alone is interesting. The feeling of leaving for a long time, let's say three months, has always been the kid-out-of-school feeling, nothing more. Traditionally, right before going, we've drunk coffee through the night and built one last system or written one last newsletter. It's a happy time, when all workaholic taboos are suspended, and we're free to whirl ourselves right over the edge of crazy, knowing a big clean block of no work lies straight ahead. We do what it takes, using all this getting-out energy, to leave the business in good shape. But since we do it every year, it's nothing new for our people, and it isn't as onerous to get out as you'd think -- now or in the past. Most of this getting-out energy goes into fun improve-the-business things, not things we feel we have to do.

An important rule: never let anyone -- yourself included -- make you "pay" for taking a vacation. You work a bit harder before, but it's because you naturally feel like it. You work a bit harder when you get back, often, because you feel like it. But don't ever buy in to other people's myth that the work should stack up. It shouldn't, or something's broke.

But your original question, I know, wasn't about when things are going right; it was about how to leave when everything's going wrong. I would give two simple answers. First, trust your people, even if they don't solve the problems exactly the same way you do. Problems that may look to be over their heads usually aren't, and they'll have a much more interesting summer if the thing is not running like clockwork. And second, remember the power of the physical solution: physically put one foot in front of the other (and I mean your physical foot), and you'll find your physical body moving out the door. Your brain may object vigorously, but it has to go, physically, where your body carries it. Then, physically, don't look back.

After a week in the woods or wherever, it will make more sense.

Find kindred souls. Hire them
Laura and I purposefully created a little world where we fit. We hire people who think like us, and we accept as bakery owners people who want to live their lives the same way. Our head of Legal is off on a one-year leave; she'll be back next September. Our hiring ads say clearly that we need people with "strong personal loves as important as their work."

This is not a little thing. You can't have a great life unless you have a buffer of like-minded people all around you. If you want to be nice, you can't surround yourself with crabby people and expect it to work. You might stay nice for a while, just because -- but it isn't sustainable over years. If you want a happy company, you can do it only by hiring naturally happy people. You'll never build a happy company by "making people happy" -- you can't really "make" people any way that they aren't already. Laura and I want to be in love with life, and our business has been a good thing for us in that journey. It's been as much or more fun than any other work I can imagine. The proof is in the simple fact that it's kept our strong interest for 30 years. But we could never have done this if we had accidentally hired serious, intense people. For me, the simple idea of surrounding ourselves with the kind of people that we want to be is the whole reason we built and stayed with Great Harvest so long. We gathered a group of people like ourselves so we could be ourselves.

What business gave us
Because we have always cared so much about having fun and being nice people, I think we would have achieved that in our lives no matter what we did, whether we had been businesspeople or not. The business didn't really give us that -- we gave that to the business. But what the business has given us in return is more excitement, even adventure, and much more constant growth and change than we would have had otherwise. I think that we are stronger as people for having chosen business as our trade. In weight training, you get strong by increasing resistance as soon you can handle it without injury. You'll get hurt if you start out lifting too much. But you can work up to weights that at first would seem impossible by increasing resistance in a stepped program. I love that about business. It makes you use everything you have -- spiritually, mentally, emotionally -- but, if you grow it right, it's always coming at you in chunks you're strong enough to manage (often, much to your own surprise). I don't know if I could have grown in the ways that were important to me doing anything else. --Pete, October 22

Pete, I wonder whether it might be harder than you think for some readers -- people running companies or wanting to -- to quite believe you. Because even as you describe convincingly and concretely how you've governed your work so it enables your life, it still can seem too easy. For many readers the idea of physically putting that one foot in front of the other, of "moving out the door," represents a forbidding leap of faith. It just doesn't look doable -- not when it feels to them as if things are barely being held together as is, not when it feels as if without them the business won't have enough fuel. You would be right, of course, to say that to the extent those perceptions are accurate they're another sign that things "are broke." Never- theless, it's wise to respect the inhibiting power of those feelings. To most people that leap of faith is scary, is what I'm saying. Maybe you already understand that. Can you help people think about how to make the leap? --Michael, October 23

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