The people who serve others are often the worst at serving themselves. Here is why your own growth keeps getting eaten and how to protect it.
There is an old saying that the cobbler’s children have no shoes. The man who makes shoes all day is so busy serving everyone else that his own children go barefoot. I used to hear it as a quaint proverb. Now I hear it as a warning, because I have lived it.
The week busyness ate my own growth
I noticed something uncomfortable recently. I do outbound for my own business, and it works every single time I am consistent. Yet over the last few weeks I had barely touched it. Not because I forgot, but because client work, some of it barely paying, had quietly eaten all the hours. The work that pays me little was consuming the exact time that would have brought me work that pays me well.
The marketer with no marketing
Once I saw it in myself, I saw it everywhere. The marketer who runs brilliant campaigns for clients and has not posted for their own business in a month. The writer who edits everyone else’s book and has never finished their own. It is rarely laziness. It is that other people’s deadlines are louder than our own. A client who is waiting feels urgent, while your own growth sits there, patient, easy to postpone.
What being busy does not excuse, and what it does
There was a stretch where my day job swallowed everything, and I did no outreach at all, and I felt terrible, sure I had lost all my momentum. Then I looked, and nothing I had built had disappeared. The system was still there, waiting. I had not gone back to zero. I had just pressed pause. Being busy does not excuse abandoning your own growth for good, but it also does not mean a hard week erased everything. You do not restart from zero. You un-pause.
How to protect your own growth time
Block it before the week starts, because the gaps always get eaten. Give it a fixed slot, the same way you would a client meeting. Make it small enough to survive a bad week, since one protected hour you keep beats three you cancel. And treat missing it as seriously as missing a client call, because the client, in this case, is you, and you are the one client you can least afford to keep letting down.
Your own growth is not the thing you do when you have spare time. You will never have spare time. It has to be chosen, protected, and defended on purpose.
So what is the one activity you know grows your business, that you have not touched in two weeks?
I write about protecting your own growth every Saturday in The Saturday Clarity Newsletter. Subscribe here: https://open.substack.com/pub/akinyinkaemmanuel