Sour Grapes
I wanna talk to you folks about wine making today. For real, this is going somewhere, I promise.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the work/life balance recently. I know that it’s important to have time off and to just turn your brain off for a while. I guess my problem is that I don’t know what that means for me. As humans we tend to “goldfish” our way into things. Meaning, we sort of find the limits of things and then expand until we either exceed those limits or juuuuuuuust fit within them. It’s the reason we all have stuff we don’t really use, no matter how big the place is that we live in. It’s also the reason my work/life balance is totally off.
When we first started this thing officially and had no clue what we were doing, it was Sept 1st, 2014. I was packing the last of my things and hitting the road to California. Bri was living in Maine and tackling things remotely. We had a Kickstarter campaign to fulfill, episodes to create, and no real idea of where to start. We’d never produced anything before in a physical sense and we got ripped off pretty handily while we figured it out. But, we made it work.
We both started doing something around that time though. We both started saying the phrase “When XXXX happens, we’ll take a break and rest for a bit.” There are lots of variations of this phrase, but we still say it to this day. For my 40th birthday I wanted to take a trip to Oregon and hike again. I wanted to get a tattoo and take a week off work with El and Bri. We didn’t end up doing that. To be honest with you, I haven’t taken anything resembling a vacation since we started this job.
The problem with that phrase we use, is that it never really feels like things are in a calm enough place to pull the trigger.
I love playing resource management games. The kind of thing where you run a business and try to make it successful or go bankrupt trying. (I’ll take a good hard look at that someday, but not today.) All that being said, I’ve been really drawn into “Hundred Days.” It’s a relaxing little game where you run a vineyard in Napa Valley and try to make different wines and gain popularity doing so. It was crazy complicated at first because I know nothing about wine. I sort of hate the taste of it. But, something about the game would keep me coming back.
Without getting into the nitty gritty, there are tons of things that can affect the taste of wine. There’s also a ton of different varieties and attributes that people expect out of those variations. Using the right yeast, when to irrigate the soul, the salt content of the ground….it’s really crazy and I realize this probably sounds boring as all hell. The point is, you start out not knowing what to do and you slowly build yourself up and learn from your mistakes.
Every year there’s a new crop to plant, a new harvest, pressing the grapes, aging and then bottling what you’ve made. Is this going to be the perfect batch? Will this be what people have been looking for? Even if you do everything right, something can happen that is outside of your control and ruin your best laid plans. A heatwave, hail, some sort of fungus, or even bugs. Any of it can destroy what you’ve made that year. So I found myself saying “Ok, after the next harvest I can finally afford to hire some workers to help with all of this just as long as everything goes perfectly.”
Then it hit me.
This is my default. This is how I treat everything that can be measured. A mythical standard that cannot be attained. A standard that I would never expect from anyone else. I looked up at the current year in the game. 2064. Would I still be treating work this way in 10 years? 20? Chasing the perfect episode that would catapult us into that mainstream? Maybe it was never meant to be “perfect.” Maybe it just has to be what it is and the best we could do at the time. Maybe we just need to be proud of what we do and the rest will come naturally. That’s how I used to do things and people seemed to really like it.
As I write this, Bri is on the first day of her two week vacation in Maine. I’ve insisted that she cut all ties with work and leave it to me. When she gets back I know it still won’t be time for me to take a vacation. However, I’m going to be working toward it and taking a little time off for myself to do something. I have absolutely no idea what that will be, but I know it won’t involve wine of any sort.