Sustainable Strategy Invites FOMO
The call to take on everything at once, to maximize our time, to avoid the opportunity cost of time, is deeply ingrained in our society.
Our bucket lists are long. Our intentions are big. And we see on the internet or social media constantly what everyone else is doing. Why can’t that be us?
And we are not just tempted to take on more. We feel shame and guilt about not “doing it all”, making the most of our time.
We feel the fear of missing out (FOMO).
That we can have (all) of the experiences we see across a community for ourselves personally.
The fear that we need to work harder to capitalize on the ideas faster, bring in revenue faster, or just put more irons in the fire faster to generate results.
The fear that someone else will have the idea first or enroll that client first.
The fear that the idea we have will go away and never come back.
But you’ve seen how that works. Corporate strategies are a smattering of initiatives that look pretty on a page that are dusted off once a year. In our businesses, you take on too much, or try to launch too many things, and your attention is not deep on any of them. Your strategy is a laundry list of hopes that never happen and keep you on the hamster-wheel of “plan for perfection, feel bad when it doesn’t happen, and then buy more into toxic productivity to stay on the wheel”. Succumbing to FOMO is a good starting point for burnout.
What if actually missing out was required?
In Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, he posits that because we will never get enough done, trying to get enough done is a recipe for missing out on life. Because we will be consumed with what we “didn’t get done.” But if we acknowledge that we are humans, and make real and deep choices about what we will not do, we find more pleasure in what we actively choose TO do.
My teacher Meghan Bursiek introduced a concept of “Concise Intentions”: a brief statement expressing how we intend to act and what we intend to do. Not just concise in language but radically concise in focus to reduce decision fatigue. To make decisions easier.
In both of these teachings, we are taught to do less things but take on our deep intentions with focus, passion, and joy.
By actively saying NO, we can more deeply say YES.
So let’s welcome some FOMO. Let’s welcome Missing Out in our Sustainable Business Strategy.
Three reasons to welcome some FOMO in your business:
Real Choice gives us the space and focus to go beyond the shallows and create real depth in what we choose.
We can choose both depth of focus and depth of time. This doesn’t have to be deep work with clients per se. This can be deeply investing in your family, or deeply investing in your health, researching a topic you find fascinating for a year at the exclusion of hopping to other topics. It can be learning just one new medium instead of IG and TikTok and Substack and Discord at the same time. And when you create deep intention, you activate your system to be on the lookout for supporting evidence.
Real Choice allows space for the unknown to appear in the task itself and in the empty space we leave.
When we are stacked back to back in meetings, or stacked back to back with offerings and programs, what space is left for creativity and magic? If we have fully mapped out our client journey, have we limited the potential in that relationship for something more than we could know right now? If we leave space in our lives, what energy might be able to fill that space? Some of the most magic I’ve felt in the past year has come from the 20 minutes after the initial 30 minute coffee chat, or in the unscheduled detour to drink wine and eat charcuterie at a retreat. By choosing fewer goals/tasks, and leaving some white space on my calendar and in relationships, the unknown can appear.
Real Choice keeps non-urgent tasks from distracting us or from being birthed before they are ready.
Ideas will come, and we welcome them! But when we are radically clear on our choices, we know every day what to work on. We know our clear themes for our focus, attention, and effort. And we can take these shimmerings, our knowings, our intuitive hits and ideas and say graciously, “Not yet. Please wait over here. I’ve heard you, and you’re brilliant. But continue to germinate and simmer and grow over here.”