For the last 5 months, I have been dealing with something very difficult. Just in a time when my life feels fully together with a great balance of family time, work and success at an all-time high there has been a snake in the grass that jumps up and bites me periodically.
By now you are thinking, this guy has some type of issue or habitual problem coming to haunt him, but it is quite the opposite. One of my largest clients –and even more, someone who has become a very good friend – has turned into someone so manipulative and calculating that I am not sure I can even recognize them.
I do my best to work 24/7, meaning I’m always turned on and looking at emails and details that it takes to run my business around the clock. There really is no work/life balance. But as I have gotten far better at it this year, there are still moments when you get sucked into dealing or seeing problems that arise. That is when this client always seemed to appear out of nowhere with damning remarks, comments so gruff that your father never spoke to you in this way even in your wildest teenage years. This would place me in a really bad place while trying to enjoy a day off or afternoon with the kids, or even the best yet – an email sent at 9:22 p.m. on a Friday night asking for a copy of our contract because they were so unhappy.
So on Saturday, September 7th, I took a long walk in the woods at the lake with my son, Hudson. This was the morning after the 9:22 email, and we had a great hour together. We saw deer running across the road. Hudson picked up sticks and jabbed at dinosaur bones (really just a dead deer’s skeleton, but dinosaur bones sounded much cooler) and enjoyed a nice hour together away from the world, ringing cell phones and nasty emails from this client that I will call the dragon.
Well, today, after much anticipation and many days/nights of plotting my next move, I finally slew the dragon. And I did it in a way that was called gracious and eloquent. The dragon breathed a lot of fire for a long time. The dragon was a really good friend of mine – or so I thought before their ego, greed and lack of character took over. The dragon was a source of great revenue, but at the end of the day, I decided it was time to slay the dragon. Nobody is certain of the future and what it holds, but one thing is certain: that living for what you want and need out of life is far better than being captive to a dragon.