Earlier this week, Seth Godin put up a blog post that really resonated with me, about different kinds of laziness.
I won’t excerpt the entire post here, but the gist was that we are quick to recognize and admonish the obvious laziness of not showing up to work enough or avoiding strenuous tasks, but there are other sorts of laziness that are more damaging: "The hard work involves embracing uncertainty, dancing with fear and taking responsibility before it's given to us.”
As so often happens with his posts, it hit me at just the right moment, as if he were writing it for me. I had just come off a leadership retreat I facilitated with my lovely group of women small business owners, one that we all had to pull ourselves away from our daily routines and do what Seth calls the “emotional labor” of making ourselves better leaders and better selves, of making the hard choices and following our own guts rather than someone else’s direction.
Which leads me to my last point: working together. This week is international co-working week. So many constituents of co-working work “independently”—as in, they are self-employed or entrepreneurs or consultants or professional creatives. This is true of the women in my group, of Seth, of Purpl’s workspace membership. It struck me that everyone in this position, while we all may berate ourselves for certain “lazy” acts (not responding to an email, getting distracted from work, not giving enough hours to their projects, etc.), is inherently NOT lazy. We are all doing the hard work of making our own direction, establishing our own rules of thumb, building new systems. And what a gift to work independently alongside others who can share your journey. We may work alone, but we can grow together.
