How do you decide when to stop doing something you love?

Deciding to stop doing something you love is tough. Sometimes, quitting creates space for the unexplored that has been overshadowed by daily busyness. Sometimes, it’s about widening the aperture to let you do other things you love.

It’s a shame watching people follow the script they’ve been told is the blueprint to a happy life and then end up lonely. 

They move to an affordable town without walkability, community, High Street, or gathering areas. The kids grow up and leave. They’ve worked all their life to retire at 60, so they have no close friends. It’s hard to meet people in sleeper commuter suburbs where garage doors spit out and gobble people up in the morning and the evening. There’s no serendipity, so they customize their lives around sports, phones, and Netflix. It’s a single-player mode – and then they get lonely and sad. 

The Pixar Animation Studios campus in Emeryville, CA, was designed to foster serendipity and collaboration among its employees. Like a village with a High Street, the campus’s layout and design reflect a deliberate effort to encourage interaction and creativity among staff members.

Serendipity and unplanned collaborations are based on the idea that creative ideas and innovations often arise from casual and spontaneous interactions.

The Pixar campus included:

• Centralized Common Areas: The campus is designed with central areas where employees naturally meet throughout the day, such as the atrium. This large, open space houses essentials like the cafeteria, meeting rooms, and other amenities, encouraging employees from different departments to interact during routine activities.
• Strategically Placed Facilities: Amenities and facilities like restrooms, mailboxes, and cafes are strategically located to encourage people to walk around the campus and bump into each other, potentially sparking conversations and ideas.
• Open Workspaces: The layout of work areas is designed to be open and conducive to collaboration, making it easy for employees to share ideas and work together.
• Creative and Inspiring Environment: The campus is designed to be visually stimulating and innovative, which is thought to encourage creative thinking and innovation.

Community and friends compound over time. Live in a place where you meet people in the community, with schools, coffee shops, parks, and gathering areas. Learn the art of small talk again, check in with your neighbors, or phone your friends, or you will be on a glide path to Netflix with no chill. 

Good Timber by Douglas Malloch

The tree that never had to fight
For sun and sky and air and light,
But stood out in the open plain
And always got its share of rain,
Never became a forest king
But lived and died a scrubby thing.

The man who never had to toil
To gain and farm his patch of soil,
Who never had to win his share
Of sun and sky and light and air,
Never became a manly man
But lived and died as he began.

Good timber does not grow with ease:
The stronger wind, the stronger trees;
The further sky, the greater length;
The more the storm, the more the strength.
By sun and cold, by rain and snow,
In trees and men good timbers grow.

Where thickest lies the forest growth,
We find the patriarchs of both.
And they hold counsel with the stars
Whose broken branches show the scars
Of many winds and much of strife.
This is the common law of life.

* * * * * *

There is an excellent sound bite from Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia. His message is that character is built during hard times. We should welcome tough problems at work and work hard and smart to solve them. Anyone who has worked in a venture-backed startup, immigrated to a new country, founded a company, started from scratch, had kids, recovered from an illness, moved to a new city, etc., knows this lesson already.