Tim Arrigo talks about how building a business can trap you into constant work, erasing your identity outside it and pulling you away from family. The real cost isn't the business itself but the marriage and presence you lose along the way.
So here you are, never thought you'd end up in a prison that you created. You created this business to provide for your family. You thought the business would give you freedom and success, and it gave you a lot of freedom, it gave you a lot of success, but only externally, not internally.
You want to be happy and At the end of the day, it's like, Tim, I just want to be happy. I just want everybody around me to be happy. And it's like I created this amazing vehicle, this amazing machine called my business, but my business has now become a prison and I can't get out of it. And my business is connected to my identity because I use my business to overcompensate for feeling like I wasn't enough. And now my identity is wrapped up in my business, so I can't delegate anything because if I do, people are in control not of my business but of who I am, and I can't give that away. I don't know what to do. The second I step away from my business, it's like I'm still thinking about work. I try to be present with my kids, but I'm still thinking about work. I'm still thinking about being productive. I can't get out of my head. I can't have healthy boundaries with even just my phone. It's like I'm constantly having to be in in a state of movement, movement, movement, distraction, work addiction, distraction.
The business that you created to provide for your family then only ended up putting you in a position where it started to rob from your family.
The very thing that you created became a machine that incinerated and eviscerated your family unit to pieces because you give more attention to the business than you do your own family. And I know you never wanted it to be like this.
No man intends for, for this to happen, to get himself to this place.
But even worse than that, now your identity is connected to it. So who am I when I'm not working? Who am I when I'm not doing these things? And then the justification about why I need to spend the time that I spend doing what I need to be doing. And then the justification about the fact that I'm burned out about the one thing that I'm doing, that I'm overdoing in my life, and I can't pull back from it. And then I'm getting upset at the way that people are reacting by the fact that they just want my time. They just want me to make eye contact with them. They just want you to see them. Can you get upset about that, man? That people in your life just want to make eye contact with you? Just want to feel connected to you? Why is that making you upset, brother? That should strike a chord in you. The people in my life care about me enough to call me out on the fact that I want to be with them. I want to spend time with them. They want to make eye contact with me. They want to connect with me. Coming in the house just exhausted and burned out with no amount of energy that I can even expend into the one thing in my life that's the greatest asset that I've ever created aside from my business, which is my family.
And then one day I look back and I'm still working, but what do I have to show for it? What did you do all this for anyway? Didn't you do it so you could enjoy what you have? Didn't you do it so you could spend the greatest moments of your life with other people around you that you loved and cared for? And if the answer is yes, then what are you willing to do to change it?
