Building a Business Is Not Inherently Radical - But I Want It To Be
Is that even possible? Honestly, I'm not sure.
Since deciding I wanted to found a beauty business I’ve been grappling with an incongruity between my values and my reality. I am building a business…but I don’t like work. Let me be clear. I am passionate about creating things that people love, but I don’t believe in the current approach to working.
From the time we can shakily write letters with fat, crumbling crayons, the people in our lives have asked us, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” This overemphasis on frantically finding the appropriate career bucket is a direct manifestation of how we don’t work to support collective well-being but to prove we are worthwhile members of society. We’re set on the path to dutifully put in grueling hours, make work our entire personalities, and underdevelop the areas of our lives reserved for true enjoyment all to collect debt and regret in the end.
Not taking a vacation is absolutely not a flex. I don’t want my corporate job to feel ‘like a family’ and slaving away for shoddy healthcare is the true build towards dystopia. These aren’t hot takes either, just some of the basic ways our labor framework cannibalizes a potentially freer, more effective, and, most importantly, a more restful reality. We are humans not machines, and when you prioritize productivity over people everyone suffers greatly.
Some might argue that if I hate working that much, I’m probably in the wrong field. To that I would recite one of Twitter’s favorite quotes, “I don’t have a dream job because I do not dream of labor.” I can’t remember who first fired off this golden piece of thought, but it’s got a chokehold on me. Some jobs are more enjoyable than others, true, but I don’t believe you can dream your way out of normalized toxicity.
When I dream, I dream of warm, luxuriating summer days spent off the coast of somewhere romantic reading and writing science-fiction novels. I dream of delicious wine and learning how to make perfectly crisp bread. I dream of helping my friends raise their future children and spending evenings around a dinner table making core memories.
On the other hand, when I think of work I think of trusting my team and ample space for imagination. My definition of work looks like strategic growth over a flash in the pan. I’m uninterested in making room for tested boundaries and burnout. So how do I build a company where these values can still live even when work - often very hard work - has to be done?