You can’t make every dinner Thanksgiving.
Like many Americans, I spent all day on Thursday in the kitchen – plus hours a day for much of the preceding week, helping prepare a Thanksgiving dinner to share with family.
Other days, our family might enjoy a home-cooked dinner that we prepare in the hour or so available. Still other days, we phone for pizza. If I expected every dinner to be the equal of Thanksgiving in terms of quality and time spent, I’d be constantly disappointed. And if I ordered pizza every night, that wouldn’t be so great, either.
We can all have expectations of ourselves in our work that are the equivalent of Thanksgiving dinner. But if we don’t let ourselves sometimes metaphorically phone in for pizza, we won’t survive in the long term. It’s better to keep going than to be amazing.
Make sure you eat every day, but don’t make every day Thanksgiving.
Make sure you do good work every day, but don’t make it unsustainable.