A Letter from Chris Suarez
IF YOU WANT TO BUILD A SHIP...
Earlier this week I read a sentence written in the 1940’s by the French pilot and author Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
We need only replace the word “ship” with whatever it is we want to build - a business, a non-profit, a product, a service, even a network or online community.
We have too often heard that it’s all about the “who”. Go out and find talent. Get into business with talent. That people are the heartbeat of any company. And although anything of value is built by talented people, the heartbeat of that group or the attraction of that talent stems from a mission that they “yearn” to deliver.
Plenty of people are willing to do hard work. Anyone can collect materials, nail together boards, fabricate sails, erect masts. But over time hard work gets, well, hard. It becomes boring. It becomes tiring. It becomes mundane. And the ship builders leave to build trains. The train builders leave to build automobiles. And the automobile builders leave to build airplanes.
We will all grow weary of completing actions and knocking out lists if we lose sight of why we are doing them. But if those builders yearned to be at sea, or if they yearned to be out on the open road, or if they yearned to be flying through the air, then you will never find yourself needing to motivate, needing to re-recruit, needing to convince people to do what it takes to win or be successful. Why? Because the sea is endless. The road is continuous. The track is perpetual. The sky is eternal. You’ll never reach the end. And the love for the mission is what will drive us through the hard work.
After nearly two years of financial uncertainty, social unrest, physical stress - just to name a few - the level of burnout has reached an all-time high across the country and world. It has led to what both economists and behavioral psychologists are calling the Great Resignation. People are tapping out and resigning from jobs, careers, partnerships. And the underlying reason? They call it burnout.
Burnout has been defined as a prolonged response to stressors related to exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy. In other words, they are tired, they feel distant, and begin to feel like what they do doesn’t matter, isn’t contributing, and often isn’t being done well.
The cause and the antidote for burnout is the same. It is mission. Either the lack of mission or conversely the clear and collective mission of the person and of the group. If burnout begins to set in, immediately reconnect to the mission. If you lead a group, beat the mission drum loudly, every day.
Sometime later Antoine wrote further on the same topic:
“One will weave the canvas; another will fell a tree by the light of his ax. Yet another will forge nails, and there will be others who observe the stars to learn how to navigate. And yet all will be as one. Building a boat isn’t about weaving canvas, forging nails, or reading the sky. It’s about giving a shared taste for the sea, by the light of which you will see nothing contradictory but rather a community of love.”
It takes different skills, a range of people, varying levels of energy, and long lists of jobs to deliver on any mission. Every one of those matters. We may forget that or even feel forgotten at times along the journey out to sea. We may find ourselves doing an activity we don’t necessarily love at the moment. Find the connection to that activity with the mission or the yearning. In lieu of resignation, in response to burnout, choose leaning into your mission-based community.
Chris