My daughter is 23 and currently working four jobs. She trains horses for us, has picked up a few of her own training clients, tends snakes for a local breeder, just added a second snake-tending gig for another breeder, and helps her boyfriend paint houses on the side.
She’s hustling, plain and simple.
I sat down with her recently and made the case that work is supposed to support life, not swallow it. That if you’re working endlessly, there’s nothing left over for the actual living part. She didn’t disagree exactly. She just pointed out that this is what it takes right now. Inflation, cost of living, the math of being 23 today. Four jobs isn’t ambition for its own sake. It’s just what the equation currently requires.
That conversation stuck with me longer than I expected, because it made me think back to my own version of the same math, at every stage of my career.
Solving the Same Equation, Over and Over
When David and I first got married, I looked hard at what it would take to make my job support the life we wanted. The number didn’t work. So I changed the equation. I found something that paid more.
That solved the money problem and created a new one. I ended up selling cars, seven years with no weekends off except one week of vacation a year. The equation balanced financially and completely unbalanced everywhere else.
So I changed it again. Moved into B2B consulting, sales. Better hours, better balance, and eventually a different problem entirely. I wasn’t excited about the work anymore. The math worked on paper. It didn’t work in any way that mattered.
So I changed the equation one more time. I started my own business.
And here’s the thing nobody tells you about that particular move: the equation doesn’t stop needing solving just because you’re the one who owns it now. When the business isn’t earning enough, I adjust the equation. Product offerings. Prospect profile. Marketing effort. When I’m working too many hours, or attracting the wrong kind of client, that’s on me to fix too. There’s no employer to blame it on anymore, no policy to point at. It’s genuinely all mine now.
That’s More Intimidating Than It Sounds
I don’t think people talk enough about how unsettling that actually is. It’s one thing to know, intellectually, that entrepreneurship means you’re responsible for your own outcomes. It’s another thing to sit with the fact that if something isn’t working, right now, today, that’s entirely on you to name and fix. No system to blame. No boss’s decision to point to. Just you, looking honestly at your own equation, and figuring out what needs to change.
It has taken me a long time to get to a formula that actually works for where I am right now. Not a formula that worked five years ago, or the one I’ll need five years from now. The one that fits this season.
And I’m sitting in exactly that kind of evaluation again. Not because my business is the kind you build to eventually sell and walk away from. It isn’t. But because life moves into new seasons, and the equation that worked for the last one doesn’t automatically carry forward into the next.
A Reminder of Why This Work Matters
One of the bigger pivots in that whole progression happened in 2012, when I moved into working as a fractional leader embedded with a client team, in house, day to day, alongside their people.
This week, for the first time since 2012, I reconnected with one of the project managers I worked alongside back then. He’s still at it, now with a different client. In catching up, he told me something I wasn’t expecting to hear thirteen years later: what I’d taught him about client profiling, how to actually determine who your ideal client is and who isn’t, and how to attract more of the right kind, had stuck with him. He said it had given him real direction in his career ever since.
I did not expect that conversation to land the way it did. A small piece of direction, shared over a decade ago, still quietly shaping how someone approaches their work today.
That’s the part of this that never gets old for me, and honestly, it’s a piece of my own equation that’s stayed constant through every other version of it. The money, the hours, the structure, all of that has shifted over the years as I solved for whatever season I was in. But knowing that a small shift in direction can change the actual trajectory of someone’s career, that’s never stopped being the thing that makes the work worth doing. That satisfaction is the one constant in an equation that’s otherwise been rewritten more times than I can count.
Why Labor Day Is a Good Day to Actually Ask
This weekend is built around work, oddly enough, by giving everyone a day off from it. That makes it a strange but useful moment to actually think about where work fits in your life right now, instead of just moving through the motions of whatever equation you solved for years ago and never revisited.
Not everyone needs to change anything. My daughter’s four jobs make sense for her season of life, even if I wish she had more room to breathe. Some equations are working exactly as they should, even when they look demanding from the outside.
But some of you reading this know your equation stopped balancing a while ago, and you’ve just been living with the imbalance because changing it feels harder than tolerating it.
If that’s you, this weekend is as good a time as any to actually look at it honestly. Not to panic, not to blow anything up. Just to ask, plainly: is this still the right formula for the season I’m actually in, or am I solving for a version of my life that already changed?
The equation is yours to solve. It always has been. That’s the hard part, and it’s also the part that means you actually get to.
