Busyness is cowardice.

Busy-ness is worn like a badge of honour, and one of the most frequently used terms when asked how someone is doing. Like being busy is an apt description of how you are.

Busy doing what? Well, everyone seems to accept that life as an adult is simply a series of running from one "obligation" to the next. Work, insistent emails, commuting, holding your kids' hands through everything they do, weddings to attend for people you barely know but happen to be related to, slack that apparently falls solely on you that others drop on your doorstep. Not to mention that any spare time is spent glued to a device which was designed to hack your neural wiring and deliver you endless amounts of whatever you choose to engage with. Yet with all this busyness, MFs seem to come up short with being able to express any sense of real fulfilment, or purpose to what they're doing, or understanding of what they actually want to do. They seem to operate with the quiet hope that they will wake up one day and all of their frenetic activity will have magically coalesced into some thing that will give them the direction or purpose that they deeply desire. Only it doesn't work like that. So again I ask, busy doing what?

It's quite tragic that we desire stillness and freedom, yet when we experience pockets of it, we place things in the way to stop ourselves from experiencing it. All of a sudden, it becomes incredibly important to re-organise the house, or to take up a side project which is time-intensive but financially-tertiary, or to sign your kids up for another 2-3 club sports. Why?

It's cowardice. Sounds harsh, but it's unfortunately true. It's easy to use incessant activity as a badge of honour. Like someone actually cares that you're spreading yourself thin for the sake of others. But it's not really for the sake of others, genuine altruism is quite rare, if existent at all.

Instead, busyness is a way to avoid confronting the uncomfortable realities that you have to face. And this goes beyond having to have a tough conversation at work or home, or letting go of some activities that don't serve you. It's about confronting the voice in your head that is dedicated to keeping you in the identity that you created for yourself. The very lens in which you view the world. Your mind is more concerned with being proven right about who you believe yourself to be rather than actually having the things that you want.

So, what's this got to do with business? Everything. This habit of incessance stops us from really taking stock of where we are best suited to apply our finite energy and focus. To accept the trade-offs that come with picking a direction without it being "proven" as being the right one; to act in the absence of evidence. The fear of having what you want in an "easier" manner than you think it would take scares us. But it's not actually easier, because it means confronting so much of your shit that you're used to drowning out with activity. It takes genuine courage to confront and ACCEPT the voice from the shadows. But if you have the stones to do it, you have the stones to do anything else in your life or business. It's the true battle of our lives, and one that you are completely equipped to win.