The Door marked responsible

About thisVideo:

Have you ever made a decision that seemed completely responsible, only to realize later it was taking you in the wrong direction? In this video, I share the story of a costly mistake I made while running my business and the lesson it taught me about discernment. I explore the difference between exhaustion that leads nowhere and effort that moves us toward who we’re becoming. If you’re facing a difficult choice or a major transition, I hope this reflection helps you recognize which path is truly life-giving.

Transcript:

Most of the worst decisions of my life looked at the time like the responsible thing to do. That’s the part nobody warns you about. You expect the bad choices to show up with a warning label. The reckless bet, the obvious vice. They don’t. They show up wearing a tie with a plan and a spreadsheet and a perfectly good reason.

I’ve been reading Ben Katz’s The Way Home, and he draws one line I can’t put down. Some paths give you life, some take it. Same fork in the road can hold both, two doors, side by side, pointing opposite ways. Here’s the thing. From where you’re standing, those two doors look almost identical. One asks you to stay who you’ve already been.

The other asks you to become who you’re not yet. And the door that shrinks you a little more every month, it almost wears the costume marked responsible. So let me tell you how I learned that. It cost me a restaurant.

You know, I had a catering crew and a Vermont winter coming up. Catering dries up in the cold. I had good people I didn’t want to lose. So I opened a restaurant. Obvious choice. Not. A place to park the crew for the winter. A place to park the crew. That’s about the most responsible-sounding thing a business owner can say. What it did not do was ten minutes of math.

Covers, food costs, rent, labor. I could have run it on a napkin while the coffee brewed. I’d have known the place couldn’t carry itself before I signed a thing. I didn’t write the numbers down. I was too busy being responsible.

We bled cash every month. Fifty thousand dollars over one year to keep the crew through one winter. And the gut punch? The next year, we had to lay some of them off anyway. I spent fifty grand to avoid the exact thing that happened regardless. My answer the whole time was the same: work harder. None of it touched the real problem, because the real problem was a number I’d refused to look at a year earlier.

And here’s the cruel part. Keeping that place alive felt virtuous. In at six, out at midnight, refusing to quit on my people. It looked like grit. It looked like loyalty. It was me refusing to see something I already half knew. That’s the diminishing path in its natural habitat. It rarely feels like giving up. It feels like holding on.

So how do you tell the doors apart when both of them wear you out? Tiredness is the wrong test. Building this project wears me out plenty. Cancer at 73 is exhausting in ways I don’t have polite words for. Life-giving doesn’t mean easy. The difference isn’t difficulty, it’s direction. The restaurant drained me toward nothing, a dead end I’d already done the math on. The new work drains me too, and it drains me towards something, toward more of who I’m becoming.

Depletion versus direction. That’s the test. So when you’re at the fork and both doors look hard, stop asking which one is easier. Ask which exhaustion is taking you somewhere.

I don’t have this solved. I’ve got a restaurant-shaped scar, a project I love, and a turnstile I walk through every week. Sometimes the right way, sometimes not.

So let me ask you what I keep asking myself. Where’s your door marked responsible? The sensible choice that’s quietly shrinking you? What’s your version of the restaurant? Hey, why don’t you drop it in the comments? And hey, I’ll see you back here next week.