The Real Cost of Entrepreneurship

Is efficiency.

Last week I wrote to you saying I won’t write to you every week. I took a conscious call to reduce the frequency of this blog to once in two weeks. Why? Because writing every weekend was eating into the precious little family time I get. And that’s not a bargain I was willing to make. 

This tussle between family time and work time is a constant thread in most entrepreneurs’ (and many startup employees’) lives.  No wonder we all get so worked up about this ‘work-life balance’ debate. 

Thankfully, I realised long ago that pitching work and life as opposites (hence, the need for balance) is the problem. If it feels that way to you - that your work is just a means to earn money so you can then go and live your life - then it isn’t the balance that needs fixing. It’s the work. Find something that doesn’t feel like such a chore!

Ofcourse, I am aware that having the ability to choose the work of your liking is a privilege. Many have to take whatever work they get. Funnily though, I find this work-life balance tussle most prevalent in my peers. They are as privileged as I am. So when they whine about a lack of balance, I do find myself rolling my eyes a bit. 

I love my work. It’s a big reason why I love my life. Without my work, my life would be miserable. I, would be miserable.

Ask my wife. She’ll tell you how grumpy I am every Sunday evening. Not because I have to go to work the next day. But because I’ve kept myself from work the last thirty-six hours :)

All this is true. And yet, I must admit, something’s amiss.

Since I’ve started up, I find that even while I hold the quantity at acceptable levels, the quality of time I spend with loved ones is going down. 

I first noticed it with my parents. As usual, they’d start telling me about their daily ops issues - how the maid again didn’t turn up on time, how the neighbor again parked in our spot, how the weather (always the weather) is again so bad today - and with alarming consistency, I’d find myself zoning out. Five minutes in, and I’d have my phone in hand and I’d be barely present. 

Initially I thought it’s them. Parents! I blamed their banality rather than my own attention span. But I could no longer ignore it once Nandita was born. 

I feel ashamed accepting it, but I struggle spending an hour, dedicatedly, with my 9-month old daughter. She is starting to emote and react now, so it’s getting better. But earlier, I couldn’t even spend ten minutes without feeling the urge to reach out for my phone and ‘do’ something. 

The minute I get onto the play-mat with her, my mind automatically starts running my to-do list. Call X. Check on Y. Read Z.  Book a meeting with A. Whatever happened to B? And before I know it, I’ve checked out.

When, multiple times, I found myself distracted, even as Nandoz was looking at me, trying to catch my attention with a toy or a smile or a wail - it hit me hard. Something was broken. With me. 

The more I reflect, the more the evidence points in one direction. My inability to be present with the ones I love is a direct outcome of me trying to become a better entrepreneur and CEO.  It’s a direct outcome of me trying to be efficient. 

In the world of people trying to achieve big things, the world of high-performers, a world I have spent my entire adult life becoming a part of - we’ve cultivated an unending fetish for efficiency. I certainly have. 

Every meeting is calendared. Every conversation has a pre-read. Every minute is planned and accounted for. Even ‘fun with family on Sunday’ is a time block. 

But relationships, especially one with a nine-month old, need inefficiency. 

Infact, wasting time, I’d argue, is how we signal love. We shoot the breeze, chit-chat, hang, and do absolutely nothing with the ones we love. It’s our way of saying - I love you so much, I’ll happily ‘waste’ time, the most valuable thing I have, on you. 

But being a good entrepreneur means you don’t spend even a second doing nothing. And you absolutely do not  waste time!

Instead, you become an efficiency juicing machine. You read Atomic Habits and create habit stacks. You create routines and stick to them like your life depended on it. You do everything you can to bring some order to your small corner of this inherently random world. 

I’ve spent the last two decades, fervently, religiously, chasing efficiency.  Only to realise that the currency of love is inefficiency. Shit. 

The problem is so bad, that when I am on the play mat with Nandoz, I find my brain constantly asking “what are we doing with our time?” 

What did we learn in this one hour, what did we achieve, what else could have we done - such stupid (so stupid) thoughts involuntarily invade my stupid brain. Distracting me from my own daughter who is blissfully lost in her struggle to start crawling. 

This, I find, is the real cost of entrepreneurship (or of chasing high performance in general). I’ve lost the ability to do nothing with a loved one.

It’s easy to blame the quantity of time, but it’s really the quality (atleast for me) that’s the real issue. And that’s harder to accept, because this one’s entirely in my control. No one to blame. 

PS: I would’ve loved to say I have a solution. I don’t. Infact, as the company grows, the demand on me being even more efficient with my time, grows. So I continue to feed that monster. Knowing fully well what this monster actually eats. Sigh. 

PPS: There is another big cost to entrepreneurship. Friendship. Family, by virtue of being around, atleast gets some time. Friends go out of sight and out of mind. Time with them goes to almost zero. This cost hit me hard last year, when the business was going through a rough patch and I needed someone to talk to. Someone who didn’t expect anything from me, in return.