From “Have It All” to “Give It All”

This week, we’ve been grappling with what it means to fail – not just in business, but at the rest of our lives: our minds, our bodies, our relationships, and our sense of self.

Lucy:

Newsletters, blogs, google groups, friends’ facebook feeds; a lot of what I choose to consume centers around women in business and modern feminism. And a lot of my mental space is taken up with an internal debate about “having it all.”

When I was focused on building someone else’s dream, “having it all” was a simpler pursuit. Once parental leave policies were fixed, it was onto the next issue. Equal pay, health insurance, diversity — when you are an operator for someone else, there is infinite room for iteration, tweaks and design.

Now that I am building my own business, “having it all” is a much more difficult pursuit. I’m not collaborating with a team and moreover, I have to “do it all” to “get it all.” And yet, the pressure to achieve and do more is constant and seemingly insurmountable.

I turned to my husband for advice to find that he had an alternative approach…

“Have it all is perfectionist,” he said “It’s driven by social pressure and it misses the point of life. It’s like shopping for life.”

“Okay, then what is the point of life?” I asked

“The activities themselves. Not the metric of whether you have all of them”

“But what if your activities are at odds?”

“They are. Everything is a trade off. And it’s futile to make things balance up perfectly. I object to have it all as if it’s yours to have in the first place. And that one could have it all. First off, it means that there is an established definition of ‘all.’ Like your life is now complete that you have ticked these boxes. What about a sentence like I want to ‘give it all.’ It’s not about what you possess. It’s about what you can do for the world. Give because it’s meaningful. Sets sights on giving to things that have meaning. The bigger the meaning. The bigger the ambition. The bigger drive required. But it’s not simply about being ambitious or driven. Those are tools for the meaning you’re after”

For me, this was pretty profound.

In my professional life, I’ve pretty consistently “given my all.” I enjoy “giving my all,” derive a significant amount of engagement and enjoyment from investing all of myself into something. But, I always felt slightly dissonant doing that in service of someone else’s vision for impact on the world.

Now, I get to “give it all” in service of my vision for impact on the world. I’m still figuring out what that vision is. I’m still figuring out what that impact will be. But, the internal debate is gone.