Will the Payout be Worth the Sacrifice?

What if the time comes when we trade our sacrifice for a payout and we find it wasn't what we had hoped?

Years ago I was sitting at dinner with my wife discussing the final details of closing on our new home in Bel Air, California. My wife, being the smarter of us, was lamenting the cost, and said that it was a big undertaking for our family, and she was second guessing whether we should do it.

I told her that was a big problem for me, but not because of the house. I said "I've been working every waking moment, non-stop for nearly 30 years. Every life event I skipped, every holiday I didn't celebrate, every experience I'll never get back was a promise I made to myself. That promise was that one day, it would enable me to do something extraordinary."

It was more than that. I continued "This is that moment for me. If we walk away from this deal, at the time when I'm cashing all of those 'life chips' in, then all of that sacrifice was for nothing. There was no bigger purpose — I was just sacrificing in vain."

And this is why my wife is the smarter one. She said "You did those things so that you could be able to make this decision. Not because you have to."

We moved back to Columbus, Ohio the next week.

The Sacrifice and the Payout

The sacrifice of being a Founder has never bothered me. I was always willing to do whatever it takes and sacrifice everything. What bothered me is that I was never really clear on what the sacrifice was going to buy me — specifically.

We all use these amorphous definitions of what the payoff will be. We think "I want a better life" or "I want more free time to myself" but we never really pin down that really means. How do we know the very moment we have it, and when and if we do get it, how do we know whether we paid the right price?

Imagine if as a kid you were working your first crappy job, and after 2 weeks of bagging groceries, mowing lawns, or babysitting obnoxious kids your employer said "OK, here's 28 cents! Thanks for your efforts."

You'd be pissed. You'd think the expectations for those efforts were way higher than the payout. That's what happens when we don't define our goals — we don't really know what we're getting paid.

The Fear of the Goal

What if we took this a little deeper, though? What if it turns out the reason we're afraid to define the goal so specifically is because we don't really know what it is, or worse, we're afraid that if we do define it, it won't be worth the sacrifice?

I speak with an ungodly number of Founders about topics like this, and I can tell you — most of them do not know exactly what their goals are. They are all super smart folks, but the reality is defining that goal is hard to do.

So most of us default to amorphous goals, which means we really never get a chance to calibrate how much sacrifice we even need. Said differently, if our actual goals aren't that hard to achieve, is the level of risk and sacrifice we're willing to endure even worth it? Probably not.

Is the Payout Worth it?

Which brings us back to the key question — when the day comes that we need to "cash our chips in" will the sacrifice have been worth it? Will we ever have a moment where we get to cash those chips in at all?

From my experience and that of other Founders, the "worth it calculation" is directly tied to how well that goal was defined. I found at that moment when I was about to close on a house that my goal wasn't really well defined. I couldn't say buying that house was "worth the sacrifice" because I never really had that specific goal in mind when I was making the sacrifice.

So I sat down at that moment and I did an incredibly deep dive on what my actual goals were. It forced me to come to terms with so many questions I had put out there but never really answered. For the first time in my life, some 25 years after I started my career, I figured out what I was sacrificing for.

The Sweet Victory of Alignment

What surprised me after that exercise was how incredibly simple (and achievable) my goals were. I didn't want yachts and private jets. I didn't want endless vacations and golf trips. All I really wanted was the freedom to build things for the rest of my life.

Some of you may know I'm an obsessive carpenter. So I concentrated all of my goals around that passion. I built my dream home. I built a Tony Stark-grade workshop inside my dream home. I'm now going to spend the rest of my life building what I want, when I want. That's my payoff and every moment I spend doing it feels like every bit worth the sacrifice.

The moment I aligned what I truly wanted with the sacrifice I was making, everything clicked. My inner peace was settled.

I'm the happiest I've ever been in my life, not because my career has some level of success, but because my sacrifice finally aligns with my payout.

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