I Choose to Believe I Create My Life. And Still the Status Quo Pulls At Me.
This summer, I took six weeks off work.
It was the end of my daughter Leah’s first year of school and our first summer holidays as a family.
The starting point for parental challenges is often logistics: how are we going to manage childcare for our children? Who is going to look after them? How much is it going to cost?
But I believe there’s more here than logistics.
As my friend Travis said to me when we were expecting Leah: all the costs of children are finite; all the benefits are infinite.
And, crucially, I believe in choice.
How do I want to choose the summer holidays to be for my girls?
And here’s where I came to: I don’t want to pack them off to holiday camps unless they actually want to go. I want them to be together, with family.
I am in the simultaneously luxurious and heavy position of running my own business, and this has been a part of my parenting strategy since I returned from my first paternity leave (1 month, unpaid) nearly six years ago.
Ever since then I have only worked four days a week.
In the last year and a bit, I have worked less: four fairly short days a week.
For most of 2026, my work week has been 20-24 hours long.
Early in my business, when worrying about taking an afternoon off to see a friend or something similar, I would often remind myself: if I can’t do this kind of thing, what’s the point of working for myself?
And so, in the end, I decided to take the whole summer off. Both for them, and for me: to slow or stop what I could feel was myself sliding towards a burnout or a breaking point.
But it wasn’t joyous for me to take that decision, to feel that I had all this time off. Just like it hasn’t always been joyous to work fewer hours.
Instead, my thinking in the build up, and first couple of weeks of the summer holidays, was mostly anxiety-led: about whether I’d made the right call, whether I could justify it during what has been a strange year or two in my business, and about what it said about me as a human and in particular as a man.
The big shift was when I took responsibility for my choice. I didn’t have to do this. I chose to.
Because I choose to believe I create my own life.
And this is the life I am choosing to create.
From the outside, most people wouldn’t have known about this anxiety. Within a couple of days of turning on my out-of-office reply, mid-July, with a message saying ‘back 3rd September’, I’d had emails and Whatsapps from people saying ‘this is amazing’.
But this is the weight of the power to choose.
We create our lives, in a dance with Fate, and we can never know if we’re taking the right steps.
As I reflected over the summer, on the forces pulling at me in those first couple of weeks before I really stepped into responsibility for creating this time, I found myself wondering about the power of the status quo and of the social currents that flow around us.
I grew up a living example of how we don’t have to follow the rules that society has for us: I didn’t got to school until I was nine and my parents did things that were really weird then (being vegan, meditating, making up surnames for their children, and more) but are incredibly fashionable a mere 30-something years later. And they did some weird things that aren’t fashionable now. (My brother and sister are thinking about carob as they read this.)
And still, I found the currents pulling me, trying to stop me from creating the summer in the way that I wanted to.
If it is that hard for me, I thought, what about for the people who didn’t see in their lives from the day they were born that most rules don’t even really exist?
The status quo has a gravitational force to it.
To resist it, to truly change things, takes rocket fuel.
But we can’t change the world’s future - whether for two little girls, or for hundreds of thousands of people - without breaking out of that gravitional field.
Beyond that atmosphere, everything is different.
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PS My latest book is The Power to Choose: Finding Calm and Connection in a Complex World, is out now. Get your copy here: https://geni.us/powertochoose
This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.