Personal Health Crisis Takes Center Stage - Lessons Learned

Personal Health Crisis Takes Center Stage 

- Lessons Learned

Way back in 1999, my life took a sudden turn. I came down with a disease called rheumatoid arthritis. R.A. is an immune disease in which the body attacks itself. In particular, the immune system goes into overdrive and begins attacking specific joints and body parts.

The symptoms are pain in the the joints (primarily hands, feet, wrists, and knees), plus extreme exhaustion. That's the very short list of symptoms. The long list is extremely long, which leads to the disease being misdiagnosed quite frequently. I was lucky to be properly diagnosed within six months. (I recently wrote a long blog post about this on my Relax Focus Succeed blog. See https://relaxfocussucceed.com/2024/07/25-years-with-rheumatoid-arthritis-my-personal-report/.)

For my business, this disease hit at a critical time. I had a part-time employee. I was still working from a home office, but my employee never showed up there. We met at coffee shops and client offices. I had about a dozen clients under contract, but this was before "managed services" and flat fee services came along. 

A key thing to remember about the world we now call break/fix: You begin every money with zero dollars in the bank and zero dollars of predictable revenue. You can expect more than that, but any client can simply say, "Let's skip this month," and the projected money is just gone.

Note the date. This was 1999. This was, strangely enough, a truly great time to be in the IT business. Really big, old systems (like the company I left in 1995) had lots of old code written in old languages. That meant that the code was filled with two-digit year fields, often written in COBOL. There was legitimate concern that 1999 would rollover to 1900 and mess up a lot of stuff. Image a spreadsheet with this problem!

Small business was another story. There were a few things that could go very wrong, like security codes expiring when the date says 1900. But most problems were simply annoying: Calendars show the wrong dates for the month and day. Many, many problems could be fixed by simply resetting the date in the BIOS or operating system.

Ultimately, businesses that did not have custom-built software had almost nothing to worry about. They might have hardware and software that was not Y2K ready. But that made the fix easy: Buy new hardware and buy new software.

Hence, it was a good year to be in the IT business. We didn't create the situation, but we had an easy fix. Not cheap. Certainly not free. But easy.

I built many promotions around Y2K preparedness and Y2K testing and verifications. And, of course, we sold a lot of hardware and software. So it was a pretty busy year.

On the personal front, we had bought a new house. I was spending my evenings fixing up the new house so we could move in, and fixing up the old house to turn into rental property. My long days included working enough hours to pay for everything (including an employee), making sales, doing all the marketing, and then working until midnight. 

My daughter was in first grade and I was the primary caregiver. So I also took her to school, picked her up, and she hung out with me doing whatever "fixing" needed to be done each day.

Given all that, it didn't seem out of place to wake up one day and feel exhausted and painful all over. It felt a lot like someone who was working hard on all fronts and physically wearing out his body at the same time.

The exhaustion grew worse and worse. Eventually, it took me more than an hour to get out of bed in the morning. I later learned that one of the key screening questions for RA is, "How long does it take you to get out of bed in the morning?" Even today, twenty-five years later, I am asked that question every time I see my rheumatologist.

Along with the diagnosis was a severe prediction: If we don't get this under control, you will be too crippled to work in ten years. I paid attention to that warning, for sure. I do whatever my doctor says. I take the medications they tell me to. I move the way they tell me. I eat the way they tell me. I do what I'm told!

It took about two years to get the R.A. under control. But I have been operating at a lower, slower level of activity since then. I simply cannot work an eight-hour day. I certainly can't work ten or twelve hours in a day. And I can't work every day. 

I have to recharge my batteries and I have to avoid habits that will build cumulative exhaustion.

My challenge was how to grow my business, manage my home life, and continue to pay all the bills while working a lot fewer hours  than anyone else. Several key lessons came out of this.

First, I learned the "absolute truth" that no one is paying attention to me. No one is paying attention to you, either. If you take off at 3PM, but still manage to answer voicemails and emails during business hours, no one will know that you're not sitting at a desk, or crawling under a desk. Clients spend their time thinking about themselves, not you.

Second, I discovered the value of real self-care. This includes exercise, going to the chiropractor, getting massages, meditating, and spending time recharging my batteries. Ultimately, I believe it is this self-care that gave me the energy and stamina I needed to get few the next five years.

When I finally got the disease "under control," my business had grown to one part-time and one full-time employee, a couple dozen clients under contract, and a solid, predictable set of revenue streams. I didn't have to do all the work, but I did a lot of it.

I decided to write a book about my philosophy for work/life balance and achieving spectacular results without working yourself to death. And, thus, the Relax Focus Succeed book, blog, and web site came into existence. RFS won a book award that is one of the very few awards I keep around where I can find it and look at it from time to time.

Ultimately, I hope the RFS philosophy takes on a life of its own. It is probably the most important thing I've ever produced. You can learn more at https://www.relaxfocussucceed.com.

All comments welcome.

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Episode 19

This Episode is part of the ongoing Lessons Learned series. For all the information, and an index of Lessons Learned episodes, go to the Lessons Learned Page. 

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