My 

phone

sits down the hall from my bedroom, on top of a short stand that has a cedar wood bowl. In the bedroom is a clock, but it shows no numbers. When I wake I can glance at the wall and know what time it is without having to think in numbers yet.

I don't care to have numbers or words thrown at me as soon as I awake. I like to keep the very first part of my mornings free of language and anything intellectual. It is a sacred time for me. In a way I pass this time in a manner that allows me to appreciate the rest of the day no matter what happens.

I don't eat breakfast at home or at a time people would consider 

breakfast

time. My 

morning

appetite has seem to gone with my youth. One of my friends tell me humans don't actually have an appetite first thing in the morning. Breakfast as we know it was a myth purported by the cereal industry. One accepted by parents who had to shuttle their kids off to school and themselves off to work. So when else could they eat but at the crack of dawn? These days people don't need to succumb to such a schedule he proudly tells me.

Neither he or I eat breakfast before work. But for him it's part of his ideology. For me, I just don't care to eat that early. Almost all of our beliefs are like this. In that we basically believe the same things, but for different reasons. Makes sense that we run a company together.

I work out of an office that's about three miles away. With a brisk walk it's about 50 minutes. The perfect amount of time to glide through the world, before the beginning of all things intellectual. All things urgent. Tasks. Things like that. There's peace in these 6600 steps before entering into that flurry of chaos. Everybody on the

internet

seems 

burnt out

. And knowing what they have to go through for much their day it doesn't surprise me. It's a slugfest out there. Everybody from every corner vying for your attention. Over the years I've come to accept that all work in our sector will be this way. The way not to burnout is to keep the supporting infrastructure solid. Case in point my 

morning routine

of walking to work, not looking at any text or numbers before I enter the office, not listening to podcasts or music. Just me and the city, the earth. Walking.

I walk in through the door and there's always something urgent going on. Not in the sense that it's urgent to the company, but it's urgent to some other person. A hot potato they're carrying. By the time they arrive at my attention the person, usually multiple, have given it their best effort for some time. By the time it reaches me, it's considered a critical problem.

In the beginning I remember letting this get to me. I would get so 

emotionally invested

. Of course this was met with rave reception from my employees since they could feel just how much I cared. I was their champion for that short meeting. They would leave with newfound confidence, and they would more often than not figure it out; because they could've figured it out the whole time had they not given up and thought they needed me; but they did need me for that... permission.

In the beginning I was like a high school best friend. Tell me your situation, I'm ride or die. This was fun, but exhausting at the end. But I just chalked it up to being a 

CEO

. That's what we need to do right? And I continued even as performance suffered. What finally got me to change was a relationship with a former high school friend of mine.

I hadn't seen him in almost two decades. And during my walk home one night I had run into him on his bike.

He was a surgeon. And a lot of our talks were about our respective crafts. Him navigating through blood vessels to unclog them and save people's lives, me running a technology company. It's funny because other people might think this relationship is so boring, but if you think about what people talk about, it's what they do all day. People who fix cars all day talk about cars. People who just watch TV or sit on the internet talk about news and gossip. I run a company, so that's basically all I'll talk about if I'm with another person who's dedicated to their craft as much as I am.

The thing he shared with me that changed how I approach my job was about how he remains emotionally uninvested in his work. He can't let his job be about providing warmth and comfort to the patient. At the end of the day he needs to deliver on the technical aspect of the job. A part of his staff concern themselves fully with the emotional portion.

He'll reduce his performance when thinking about Sally the patient, and how she's only in her thirties and how she shouldn't be going through this disease and how devastated her family would be if he were too...

All he can focus on is the circulatory system. The blockage. Systems. Pipes. No Sally phD married with children who volunteers. You cut all that out. Not because it's bullshit, but because it won't help. My friend the surgeon is the surgeon. Not her best friend.

"See, Tony. You are not your employees best friend. You are their boss."

"So what do I do?"

"You already know. You just want permission."

I began approaching the running of my company without emotion. I began to focus on the processes. The components. This didn't mean I treated people like disposable parts. I still considered their emotions as part of the processes. I just couldn't allow my own emotions to get invested into the equation. I had to ask, what does this organization need to achieve the current goal.