Is sustainability a personal struggle?

I'm sending out this issue of Oxymoron on the Winter Solstice and it will be the last of 2022. Today is the day when we can celebrate the half way point in the darkness of winter, safe in the knowledge that each day ahead will now bring a little more light.

Despite many successes and some very special moments this year, it's also been a tough year for me personally. The thing about running a small business is that even when things are going well, there are always pressures that are hard to step away from. As a business owner, even when you do take a break, the responsibility and accountability to ensure that clients and staff are taken care of, present and future, does not go away. These pressure’s are intensified when you actually care deeply about the people you work with, the clients that you serve, and the impact that you are trying to create in the world.

I’ve been looking forward to Christmas as that rare time in the year when it’s a little easier to step away and take a real break, but this year it seems that I didn't quite make it to the finish line and stopped work earlier than planned.

It feels like now is a good time to write about something that has been on my mind for much of this year in regards to sustainable business. That is, the challenge of sustaining our own efforts and wellbeing over the long term.

Running a business is hard. Trying to make positive change in the world is hard. Both of them are intense, long term projects. They are ultra marathons, not sprints. And those of us trying to run “sustainable businesses” are trying to do both at the same time. It is not for the faint hearted.

I've been running Wholegrain Digital together with Vineeta for nearly 16 years. It's been fantastic in many ways and I am immensely proud of what we have achieved, but it has also been relentless - physically, mentally and emotionally. Earlier this year I wrote a post about leadership and listed Grit as one of the key qualities needed from leaders pursuing a better future. I would like to think that grit is one of the qualities that has helped us get this far, though as I watched the gritting lorries driving around the icy roads last week, I couldn’t help but wonder whether my own grit was suffering from supply chain shortages.

Then again, perhaps I just need to take some time to go back to the gritting depot and refill. As I begin to emerge from the darkness into the light, I'm already feeling a sense of regeneration, strength and growing optimism. Furthermore, I am being reminded that it is through our struggles that we grow as human beings.

This has been a principle that I've always embraced in my personal life. In fact, it is in some ways my belief in this principle that led to the creation of Wholegrain all those years ago, as I pushed myself to leave the comfort of the life prescribed to me and tried to follow my own path. It didn’t make any sense to anyone but Vineeta and I at the time but looking back, it was undoubtedly the right thing to do. In fact, everything truly meaningful that I have achieved in my life has come from the times when I didn’t take the easy, comfortable path.

Just minutes away from our warm cosy home, the New Forest ponies show us what real sustainability is, enduring the hardship of winter in the wild

So here’s the thing that I find awkward to talk about in my role as a business owner, employer and team leader. In the world of purpose led business and perhaps even more so in the privileged tech and creative industries, struggle and suffering have become something of a taboo. Employers like myself truly care for their staff and want to protect them from suffering, and employees in many cases expect to be protected from it. There is an assumption in the modern world of work that suffering is inherently bad. I think this is a mistake.

Buddhism teaches us that life is suffering, but that our struggles are the teacher that help us attain higher states of being. I think most of us know deep down that nothing worth doing is ever easy. We grow as humans in those times when we push ourselves to our limits and instead of backing away when it gets tough, we continue forward to transcend those limits. We create meaningful change in the world when we do things that are difficult to do and persevere in the face of resistance. We find happiness and fulfillment as the contrast to the struggles that we go through to find them.

I know this might be controversial, but sometimes I feel that our efforts to make everyone comfortable and protect them from suffering run at odds with our goals as purpose led organisations and with our true needs as humans. That isn’t to say that we should not show care and compassion, but simply that when we shield people from facing their own struggles head on, we rob them of the opportunity to fulfill their true potential and make their fullest contribution to society.

While we should strive to never cause unnecessary suffering, we must adopt a more balanced and nuanced perspective in which we recognise that suffering is a necessary part of the process of change. This is one of the great paradoxes of life, that if we truly want to improve ourselves and the lives of others, we must embrace discomfort. This is not easy to do.

We can see this challenge most clearly when we zoom out and look at society at large. The countries, organisations and individuals that have the greatest power and resources to solve the big problems in the world are the ones that have the least intrinsic motivation to do so, because they are the least affected by the problems. When life is comfortable, our natural inclination is to maintain the status quo. To do otherwise, would be to bring discomfort and suffering upon ourselves.

And yet that is exactly what we must do if we want to live fulfilling lives, grow as human beings and contribute to a better future. We need to be prepared to lean in to the hard problems and stick with them, not for a few weeks or months, but for the long haul.

All of this is to say that life is a dance between the light and the darkness. We must push ourselves to fulfill our own potential and make our highest contribution, but be careful not to push ourselves over the invisible edge. We should embrace challenge with open arms, yet also give ourselves permission to step back and take a break when we need it. The pursuit of environmental and social progress is a struggle that may at times butt heads with our own sense of personal sustainability, and that’s a delicate balance we must each find for ourselves. In my case this year, I didn’t quite get it right.

So on that note, I'll be taking some much needed rest until next year and will return when I’m ready to take on the big challenges and opportunities of 2023. Until then, take care of yourselves and have a very Happy Christmas.

P.S. If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy Martin Palethorpe’s recent guest post on Conscious Leadership.