Inheriting The Business, Not The Lifestyle

I spent years building the exact life I wanted. Then I walked away from it.

I woke up refreshed. No alarms—just the morning sun on my face. I got out of bed, stretched, wandered into the kitchen, made myself a cup of coffee, and grabbed a few squares of chocolate.

Then I climbed back into bed, snuggled up to my girlfriend (now wife), opened YouTube, and happily lost myself in brainrot while slowly sipping my coffee and working my way through the chocolate. There was nowhere I really had to be.

In about an hour, I got up to shower, brush my teeth, and take a dump. Eventually, I got in my comfy sweatpants and oversized T-shirt, sat down at my desk, opened up my laptop, and began to work. I wrote on my blog for about 2 hours. Then I spent about an hour on marketing. If I felt like it, I also recorded some audio or video content.

All of this took me about 4 hours at most. Meanwhile, people were buying my books and courses without me lifting a finger.

By one or two in the afternoon, my workday was over. I’d make lunch, go for a walk, play some video games, head to the gym, and spend the rest of the evening with my girlfriend.

That was my typical workday. On the weekends it was more or less the same. Only without work and with more hikes, runs, day trips, and sex.

This was the life, man. I spent years building it. Creating a business that, in the end, asked very little from me. Back when I was a simple breakup-advice blogger, publishing my surprisingly profitable digital farts on the interwebz.

I still grieve that life… Not because I regret where I’m today. And not in the sense that I’d go back. It’s more like missing the town where you grew up. You know you’ve outgrown it, but part of you still wishes you could spend one more afternoon there.

These days, my phone never really stops ringing, and my Teams channels and inbox keep flooding with messages. If it’s not a supplier, it’s a hotel manager or a contractor. If it’s not a hotel manager or contractor, someone walks into my office needing a decision. Renovations don’t politely pause because it’s Saturday. Coffee is no longer a calm morning ritual, but a fucking necessity to stay sane.

Before, my day belonged almost entirely to me. Now… not so much. That being said, none of this came as a surprise. I knew what I signed up for when stepping into the family business. I knew I’d have to eat shit for a while before I could make my own schedule and set my own rules.

However, what did surprise me was the people. I expected my dad to be a workaholic, sure…. But I didn’t expect to discover an entire ecosystem of them.

I essentially found myself surrounded by people who genuinely live for work. People who seem to derive much of their purpose from it. People who rarely take weekends off and who take pride in working insane hours.

To this I say, respect. I respect the hustle. Hell, I admire it. These fuckers are crazy in all the right ways and it’s kind of beautiful to witness.

But I’m not one of them.

Don’t get me wrong—I can work unbelievably hard. I’ve done twelve-hour days. I’ve sacrificed weekends. I’ve ignored sleep. I’ve lived through seasons where work consumed everything else.

When I started my breakup business, my first years were like this. But the end goal was always to arrive at a place where I never have to work more than 4 hours a workday.

All of this is wierdly difficult to admit. Especially when you are supposed to inherit the family business that everyone around you has devoted a massive chunk of their life to building. In this environment, saying that work is only one part of your life can sound suspiciously similar to saying that you don’t care enough.

And maybe I don’t.

Sure, I care deeply about doing a good job, protecting what my family built, and becoming a capable leader. But I also care about being a good husband. A father one day. My health. Writing. Training. Long breakfasts. Slow mornings. Pointless afternoons. The occasional day where I binge video games, jerk off, and absolutely nothing productive happens.

I don’t want those things to become these little rewards I earn after work has taken everything it wants from me.

I don’t think any of these things should need defending. Still, I sometimes wonder whether this makes me fundamentally unsuited for the role waiting for me.

• Can you lead people who are more obsessed with the business than you are?

• Can you earn the respect of people who answer emails at midnight when you’re committed to leaving your phone in another room?

• Can you inherit a company without inheriting the lifestyle of the person who built it?

• And perhaps the most uncomfortable question of all: will my father ever fully respect the way I want to live?

Because to him, our hotel business is far more than a job. It’s his purpose. His battlefield. It has occupied his thoughts for decades, followed him home every evening, interrupted vacations and dominated conversations.

He didn’t build his life around the company. He built the company, and then his life arranged itself around it.

So I’m in the process of inheriting this company. But I don’t want to inherit that exact arrangement.

That does not mean I want to coast. It does not mean I want to show up late, avoid responsibility and collect dividends while everyone else cleans up my shit.

I know that ownership comes with obligations. There will be crises. There will be difficult years. There will be periods when the company needs more from me than I would ideally like to give.

I can accept that. What frightens me is not sacrifice. It’s permanent sacrifice disguised as ambition. Or the slow normalization of stress.

The way an exceptional week becomes a normal week, then a quiet week starts to feel lazy. The way you begin answering messages during dinner, then during vacations, then from the fucking delivery room. The way everyone applauds your commitment while your actual life quietly shrinks around you.

I have already noticed how easily this happens. So I’m trying to protect parts of my life before they ever get a chance to disappear.

Nothing revolutionary. I try to leave work at a reasonable hour when there is no genuine emergency. I even try to leave early if I can. I question whether every problem truly requires my involvement and delegate more. I resist the urge to prove my commitment through performative exhaustion. I do my cardio and horsecock heavy weights even when work left me drained and tired. I keep writing every week, partly because I enjoy it and partly because it reminds me that I existed before hotels.

And above all, I’m trying to distinguish between two things that look eerily similar from the outside: being responsible and being permanently available.

The first is a requirement. The second often just means your business structure sucks. Maybe this is where my contribution will be different.

My father built an extraordinary company through sheer force of will. Relentless energy. An almost superhuman tolerance for stress, risk, and uncertainty. I don’t think I possess that capacity. More importantly, I’m not sure I even want to.

So my job is not to replicate that. I think my job is to build the systems, structure, and leadership team that make such a lifestyle unnecessary—to build a company that no longer requires someone like my dad.

That is the optimistic interpretation, anyway…

The less flattering possibility is that I simply lack the hunger required to lead something this large.

I don’t yet know which one is true.

For now, I’m living somewhere between gratitude and opposition. Grateful for the opportunity, the responsibility, and the absurd privilege of gradually inheriting something so special. Yet opposed to the assumption that honoring it requires surrendering the rest of my life to work.

I want to become a good owner. I want to become a good leader. I just don’t want either of those titles to become the only interesting thing about me.

Now I don’t know if I’ll still feel this way five or ten years from now. But if I ever wake up and realize work has quietly become my entire identity, I hope this essay reminds me that it was never really the life I wanted.