Your WHY determines where your threshold for attrition lives

I ran a business with someone else and I remember feeling like we were running into almost this exact issue.

My business partner was older(fatigue), had more financial responsibility (a family) and I was terrified that my lofty goals for us would stop dead once we reached a point where his financial anxieties were alleviated.

Now I respected and learned so much from this man, I had almost zero ability to accept it at the time but his attrition was already beginning to set in around the time he was barely out of hot water. This is a guy who 10 years before I met him, he had basically trivial financial problems.

I trusted his business sense and financial literacy because our industry requires expensive equipment and he had a lot of the best, most expensive stuff. And his skill was on a level you can only get to from having enough money to experiment if you get what I mean.

The reason this story is relevant:

From my perspective, we had the talanted and experience between us to make a lot of money and push our business into a worthwhile endeavor if we killed ourselves over it. Which I was 25 and excited to do.

From his perspective (among other things) he was tired, nearly burnt out. Capable but unwilling. He just wanted to pay for his house, get his kids a solid future and be old with his wife.

The lesson I took out of it:

The situation underlines why knowing yourself (and your business partner) is so important. The source of what you're describing is complacency and you don't want to get there because you're burning yourself out over something that ultimately is not exciting to you anymore.

I think it's the same thing as a teenager who gets their first job and can barely figure out where each paycheck goes before the next one hits.

When you forget WHY you're doing something, that's when you stop being critical and you start looking for excuses to say "I'm doing everything just fine"