Soundtracks by Jon Acuff

Author:Jon Acuff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business/Motivational;Thought and thinking;Fear;Success;BUS046000;BUS107000;BUS019000
ISBN: 9781493428854
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2021-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

Something’s Got to Flip

If you listen to true, helpful, and kind soundtracks, working for yourself can be a wonderful experience. This is what I’ve been told anyway by CEOs who seem genuinely happy, but that wasn’t my experience for my first seven years as an employee of Acuff Ideas, LLC.

I was the one with the stopwatch on my desk to monitor bathroom breaks. I was the one who tried to listen to twenty-five educational podcasts a month. I was the one who would dock myself ninety seconds if I went to the kitchen to grab a coffee just to make sure I wasn’t stealing time from—who? Me? The company? None of it made any sense, but there really wasn’t much of a mystery. I was a terrible boss because I was listening to terrible soundtracks.

I kept hearing things like, “You’ve got to get ahead. Other people are doing so much better than you. If you take a ten-minute break, you’ll lose all your momentum. You should be doing so much more. This whole thing could fall apart at any second.”

This situation wasn’t new to me. I’d wrestled with this bad-boss idea for years. My wife pointed that out when I first started the company, but it felt too tangled and difficult to really do anything about. It wasn’t until I first started exploring my overthinking that things began to change. It wasn’t overnight or instant. How could it be? You can quit any terrible job and leave a bad boss in the dust unless you work at home and the boss is you.

How would I storm out after turning in my notice to me? How would I flip myself off? How would I peel away in my car in a blaze of glory in my own driveway?

The process of becoming a better boss wasn’t that dramatic. I just started looking at my soundtracks related to work. There were a dozen different ones playing, but they were all saying roughly the same thing: “The only way to be successful is to be hard on yourself, and if that means you’re a bad boss, so be it.”

I’d given that approach to running my business the old college try for seven straight years, and that felt like enough. When I retire old soundtracks, I often say out loud, “That’s enough of doing it that way. Let’s try something different and see what happens.”

I’d spent fifteen years working in corporations before I started my own business. I had good bosses and bad bosses. This is going to surprise you, but I preferred to work for the good ones. I had more fun, got more done, and actually looked forward to work when I had a good boss. Crazy, right?

That afternoon in the driveway, I asked myself a simple question: “What would the best boss do right now?” The answer was not difficult to find. In that exact situation, the best boss would say, “You’ve been out of town for a few days. It’s five o’clock.

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