This newsletter was supposed to arrive yesterday, but yesterday I was on vacation. In fact, I was having such a good time that somewhere between the ocean, the food, the hot tub, swimming, exploring different islands and spending time with my family, I completely forgot that Friday was Friday and that I had a newsletter to write. So here I am on Saturday, sitting on a flight back home, remembering my community and realizing that perhaps the reason this newsletter is late is exactly what I needed to write about this week: the importance of rest when you are building.
I took a much-needed vacation with my children, my mother and her friend. We went on a Royal Caribbean cruise that stopped in the Bahamas, Jamaica and CocoCay. We ate far too much, enjoyed the different islands, swam, sat in the hot tub, spent time by the ocean and genuinely allowed ourselves to have a good time. In Jamaica, I did something I had never done before: I climbed Dunn’s River Falls with my mother and my children. Three generations of us experienced it together, and it was one of those moments that reminded me that while I spend so much of my life thinking about what I am building for the future, there is also a life happening right now that deserves my attention.
As entrepreneurs, it can be difficult to give ourselves permission to take a vacation. There is always something that needs our attention and usually something that needs money. There is another investment to make, an employee to pay, a project to fund, an opportunity to pursue or a problem that needs to be solved. You can look at the cost of a vacation and immediately start calculating what that same money could do in the business. Before long, you convince yourself that this is not the right time. You tell yourself that you will travel when the company is more established, when revenue reaches a certain level, when the next project is completed or when things become less demanding. The problem is that if you are genuinely building and growing a business, there may never be a time when everything is settled.
I have had seasons when I believed the responsible thing to do was simply to keep going because there was always a legitimate reason not to stop. However, I am learning that rest is not something that has to exist separately from ambition. In fact, when we think about the role of a founder or senior leader in a growing company, rest has a very practical business purpose. As a company grows, our greatest contribution should increasingly be the quality of the decisions we make rather than simply the number of hours we work. Cognitive fatigue affects judgment, patience, risk assessment and emotional control. You can work fourteen-hour days and still reduce your effectiveness if you are making important decisions from a place of exhaustion.
This is particularly important when you are scaling. The decisions become larger, the financial consequences become greater and more people depend on the choices you make. At that stage, clarity becomes a business asset. Sometimes stepping away allows you to return to a problem with a completely different perspective. Research into creativity and cognitive recovery has also shown that the brain continues processing information when we step away from concentrated work. This helps explain why solutions sometimes appear while we are walking, traveling, exercising, swimming or doing something completely unrelated to the problem we have been trying to solve. Rest creates the mental capacity to see things we may have missed while we were constantly working.
Taking time away also gives entrepreneurs an opportunity to assess something else that is critical to growth: how dependent the business is on the founder. A business cannot truly scale if every decision, approval and problem has to come through one person. If everything stops because the founder is unavailable for several days, that is useful information about the systems that still need to be developed. Growing businesses need processes, delegation and people who are empowered to make decisions. A vacation can unintentionally become a test of those systems because it forces other people to take ownership and allows the founder to see where the company can function independently and where it still relies too heavily on them.
That does not mean every entrepreneur will completely disconnect while on vacation. I certainly did not disappear from my businesses. There were things I checked and situations I responded to when necessary. The difference was that work was not the center of every day. I made a conscious decision to be present with the people I was traveling with and to enjoy the experience we had paid and planned for. There is very little benefit in traveling somewhere beautiful with your family if you spend the entire vacation physically beside them but mentally sitting in your office.
That brings me to something I think entrepreneurs sometimes overlook when we talk about the cost of building. We usually think about cost in financial terms: capital, payroll, overhead, investment, debt and risk. But there is also an opportunity cost associated with constantly postponing our personal lives. Our children are growing while we are building. Our parents are getting older while we are building. Friendships and relationships still need attention while we are building. There will always be another business goal, but there will not always be another summer when your children are exactly the age they are today. There may not always be another opportunity to climb a waterfall with your mother and your children at the same time. Those experiences have value too.
This does not mean that everyone needs to book an expensive vacation or take a cruise. Rest has to make sense for your financial reality and the season your business is in. Sometimes it is a weekend away, a day spent with family, dinner with friends or simply deciding that work is finished at a reasonable time. The important thing is to stop treating rest as a reward that you will only deserve once you have achieved enough. For ambitious people, “enough” has a way of constantly changing. You reach one revenue target and set another. You complete one project and start planning the next. You hire ten employees and begin thinking about twenty. You enter one market and start looking at the next one. If rest is something you only allow yourself when everything is finished, you may discover that everything is never finished.
I also believe that maintaining strong relationships outside the business can make us better leaders. Family and friends give us an identity that exists independently of company performance. They remind us that a difficult quarter is not the totality of our lives and that a successful quarter does not define our worth either. That perspective can be particularly valuable in entrepreneurship because businesses naturally go through cycles. There will be wins, disappointments, unexpected problems and periods when things do not move as quickly as we would like. Having a full life outside the business helps us maintain perspective through those fluctuations.
As I sit on this flight heading home, I know exactly what is waiting for me. There will be emails to answer, meetings to attend, decisions to make, projects to move forward and problems that need solutions. There is still plenty to build, and my ambition has not changed because I took a vacation. If anything, I am returning with more energy and perspective. I spent meaningful time with my children and my mother, enjoyed new experiences, visited beautiful places, ate far too much food, climbed Dunn’s River Falls and, apparently, relaxed enough to completely forget that my Friday newsletter was due.
Maybe that is not such a bad thing.
The lesson I am bringing home with me is that we should not build successful businesses at the expense of experiencing the lives those businesses are supposed to help us create. We need to build companies that can eventually function without our constant presence, protect the relationships that matter to us and recognize that recovery is part of sustaining high performance over the long term. There will always be more work to do, especially for ambitious entrepreneurs. The objective should not be to wait until the work disappears before we rest. It should be to learn how to build, rest, reconnect and then return ready for the next stage.
So yes, this week’s newsletter is one day late. I was busy making memories with people I love. Now I am on my way home, rested and ready to get back to building.
If this resonated with you, share it with another entrepreneur or builder who keeps promising themselves they will take time off “when things settle down.” And if you are new here, subscribe to No Blueprint. Every week, I share what I am learning in real time about business, leadership, growth, setbacks, money and the realities of building something meaningful when there is no perfect roadmap.
Until next week,
Lady Laide
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