A paradox of identity

Think about all those times you've left a meeting with that carefully drafted background document still in your bag or all those old business cards you paid for but never handed out. Certainly it's waste, but is it overcapitalisation?

Probably. The challenge of spending not-too-much on a given project is one of the fundamental challenges of business. The only difference in a Headcount:1 world is that we just call it 'waste'.

The challenge faced by the self-employed is that we constantly undervalue our time. I suspect that this is because of our extremely high levels of self-identification: what we do is who we are.  Ergo, if we're not working how do we know we even exist? I'm being more serious here than I may seem: -

Q: What's the difference between self-employment and unemployment?
A: The self-employed get up every morning and do something.

Farmers patrol their fields. Stand-up comics take unpaid gigs. Consultants like me trawl the Internet accumulating a level of detail about my clients that runs needlessly deep. Others dutifully attend 'networking' events and try and sell their services to suppliers with identical offerings to our own. We work because that's what we do.

How do I know this time is wasted? Because if a more valuable activity presented itself we'd shift our time, energy and attention to it in a heartbeat. We waste time, energy and attention on our egos as manifested in our businesses. The alternative is to 'waste' those scarce resources on our families and a healthier version of ourselves.

No self-employed person can lead a truly happy and balanced life without resolving this paradox of identity