🚓 Ghost Car
“Do you think staaartups in France take the month of August off?” the man at the back table asked, barely suppressing a scoff.
This was a rhetorical question, yet he asked it amongst an audience of seventy-five people at the end of a recent Free Time keynote. He was making. a. point.—that the principles in my third book wouldn’t work for people or companies like him.
He is ambitious. He is in growth mode, still rocking the “I’ll sleep when my start-up is a unicorn” bumper sticker.
One of my husband Michael’s passions is simulated car racing. He built a rig in his office with pedals and a steering wheel, a large monitor, and powered by a PlayStation 5. He enjoys driving while talking to family or friends on the phone, together on a long road trip around miles of winding Gran Turismo track—his morning commute.
After finishing a lap, a ghost car appears on the screen to show previous track times to beat. It is satisfying to surpass the ghost car, because it shows you’re improving.
Improving by what metric? Speed.
Earlier in the keynote, I spoke about how to “Free up Founder Time” by putting recurring Do Not Schedule (DNS) blocks on calendar.1
Taking a page from one of my European clients, I now have all of August blocked from Calendly, so no one can grab that time unless I deliberately make an exception.
Maybe he’s right. Maybe startups in France don’t take the month off (if you know the answer to this, please let us know in the comments!).2
But many other companies do, and I have been impressed by the fact that over seven summers working with a big-brand luxury retailer, I never once received an email from my French counterparts during this magical pocket of time. They do what they need to in July (a bit of a sprint), and then they resume in September. No one seems worse off for it, only refreshed after a month of proper sea and sunshine.
While at dinner afterward—alone in my hotel room, of course—I felt the specter of my formerly ambitious self's ghost hovering nearby. I was once motivated by achievement, with detailed goals I would write on paper—by hand, the now-debunked research shows!—so I could manifest every single one of them.
But I wasn’t at ease or joyful during this time, not in comparison to how much calmer I became after dropping this intense need to achieve—to do things right and obsessively seek others’ approval, admiration, and respect (and most of all, earn my own).
I try to remind myself of this—how much more well-rounded I am—when I watch the ghost of my ambitious past lapping me. My ghost car has the hungry passion of my twenties, the energy to pursue big visions at breakneck speed. My ghost car does whatever it takes to market books and services and Substacks successfully, networking up a storm along the way.
So what if the car crashes every now and then? It’s on the fast track, and that track is paved with success, admiration, respect, status, and power.
The other day I met someone my age driving the same speed as my ghost car, and I felt pangs of regret. Money was not an object for them; they could buy nice things for themselves and others, they had plenty saved for retirement, and they could take care of whatever problems needed fixing without worry. Most importantly, they seemed to have the limitless energy to pursue career goals that I once did.
What would be possible if I hadn’t taken my foot off the gas?
Why did I pull over again?
Why do I seem to need so many pit stops?
Oh yeah, because I became miserable and sick driving so fast, but that part is easy to forget. As I have tried to settle into my ideal cruising speed, I would be lying if I said there weren’t moments where I wished I was back in a Ferrari again. I’m in a practical car now, one with more space and energy efficiency, but I can’t help but wonder about the ghost self for whom this one is barely a speck in the rear-view mirror.
I don’t have kids, but I imagine it’s how some parents who lean sideways from their careers (even temporarily) feel when they become primary caretakers. As
astutely writes at , they’re not “staying at home”—they are driving just as fast taking care of tiny people, making laps around a different track. “Domestic labor is labor,” she writes.
“I’m not sure,” I answered the man in the back from the podium, a bridge of judgment suspended between us as the audience awaited my reply.
“Yeah, didn’t think so,” he said, as laughter rippled across the room.
Gotcha!
“But even if they don’t, can you run an experiment?” I asked. “Can your team try not holding any meetings for two weeks in August, even if you are still working?”
I did my best to meet him somewhere in the middle, even though I knew he wasn’t seeking a legitimate reply. “This is an invitation,” I said. “A thought experiment, a way to do less busy work so you and your team can do more of your best work.”
I doubt he was satisfied with my answer, but I was.
I may never lap my ghost car by traditional success metrics, but I’m also no longer interested in trying. I just forget that sometimes, when I am temporarily blinded by how fast the other one is going.3
❤️
📆 My recurring DNS blocks are as follows, and I make exceptions as needed:
Mondays and Fridays
The day after national holidays, and the full week of Fourth of July
All of August—too hot! My office is a sauna.
Mid-December through Mid-January—too chaotic!
My birthday and wedding anniversary—sometimes +1 day on either side, when I can
What are yours? Let me know in the comments :)
Michael pointed out that French companies do this because a certain amount of vacation days are mandated by law, and because the French work to live instead of living to work. From a blog called Blu Selection on working days and culture in France (emphasis mine):
French employees enjoy generous annual leave allowances. The legal minimum annual leave entitlement in France is 25 working days per year. However, many companies offer even more leave days as part of their employee benefits package.
August is practically a ghost town in some parts of France. Many businesses, especially smaller ones, shut down for a few weeks as the locals flock to the beaches and countryside. This mass vacation phenomenon, known as “Les Vacances d'Été,” is when the French take full advantage of their well-deserved time off to enjoy summer holidays.
If you enjoyed this post, you might also appreciate the others in the ghost-self series:
In bioscience, processes that occur too fast are often a sign of illness. Thirty trillion cells must live on time, mature on time and die on time or it's cancer-city. Natural, healthy processes occur in what is called "the fullness of time" Try to hurry an apple off the tree and you get a flavorless knob of plant tissue. Our supermarkets are chock full of fruit that has been hurried to market and ALL of it tastes crappy (and its saturated with pesticides and preservatives). The art-world overflows with paintings removed from their studios to gallery walls before they have absorbed the ideas and effort that would make them viable. Movies are produced and released to theaters before the good parts have been written. Businesses are launched with no idea if there is a market. Songs flood the airwaves missing even a hook, let alone a fresh melody or rhythm. Hurrying anything is a disease state saturated in fear. The smell of fear fills the air even if the turd is polished.
Culturally, people have, for instance, startups in Europe *and* they also still take that time off. It’s woven into the fabric of people’s lives and it’s what they value. I typically wind down from the 2nd/3rd week of July through to the first week of September when the girls go back to school. I’m also usually in wind-down mode from mid-December until mid- to late January, a habit that started with the podcast several years back that I’ve continued. There’s normally a few weeks around Easter when I’m in ‘skeleton mode’ where I’ll keep things light while the girls are off. For me, I’ve had to acknowledge that I’m quite seasonal and also have bursts of energy and then need to be quieter, so going hard at it all year round no longer works for me.