I Don't Know How You Do It

I travel a lot.  A lot.  For more than 6 years I have had the privilege of running a business that I love, a business with a slight problem – its location.  I live in San Francisco and the business is in Madison, Wisconsin.  So, for 6 years and counting I have been “commuting” – dividing my time among home and Madison and business trips to cities around the United States.  People say to me all the time, “I don’t know how you do it” and there are two pretty simple answers.

First of all, I am pretty damn lucky.  While it was the investors who hired me who agreed to this arrangement, it is my team members who bear the brunt of the difficulty.  They are incredibly patient with me, with having a CEO whose lifestyle gets in the way of their needs sometimes. They work around my schedule and I work around theirs and we have developed mutual trust, something which is critical given the amount of time we spend apart.  So how do I do it?  In this case, I am lucky to be doing this, to be, in a way, having my cake and eating it, too.

But in addition, the answer is that we all do what we have to do.  Yes, I have a hard commute.  I am away so much, logging days and weeks away from my friends and my new husband, getting jetlagged and delayed, feeling like trips home are just that, trips rather than homebase.  But it is what I do for a business I care passionately about and have nurtured to success. 

 My daughter works 7-day weeks, with 12-hour days.  Why?  Because that’s what she has to do to make it in her career.

My son works a less-than-satisfying day job as he relentlessly pursues being an actor and growing his own business.  He auditions and practices and does it all over again.  Why?  Because he is committed to pursuing his dream.

My sister goes from her grueling profession to even more grueling nights and weekends as a graduate student.  Why?  Because she has a vision of where she is trying to get to and it is a hard road.

And my young friend who is a new mother gets up night after sleep-deprived night to attend her baby.  Why?  Because she has to.

We ALL have things we have to do which are hard to do and others can’t imagine.   And we do them because we are human, because we get to choose some of what comes our way in life and because we have to cope with what we are dealt.  Trying to imagine stepping into someone else’s shoes may seem difficult, but my guess is that most of us are doing something which someone else can’t imagine.   You don’t know how I do it?  I bet you do, actually.