For the first five years of running my business I paid back over two million pounds in debt. Asset finance leases, punitive lenders, terms that should never have been signed but were because we needed the equipment to open the doors. Most people thought it was impossible. We did it anyway.
Then just as we cleared the last of it, COVID hit. Government enforced closures. No income, no choice, more debt taken on just to keep the business alive. Nearly a million pounds gone through no fault of ours or anyone's.
There was a class action. Hundreds of businesses like mine, trying to recover something. I sat on the committee, spoke to lawyers regularly, listened to endless updates over months. After years of work we reached the point where the risks of pushing further outweighed the potential rewards. We accepted a settlement. It was a fraction of what any of us felt we were owed.
That was the moment. Not dramatic. Just quiet and final. I had nothing left. No heart for it. No stomach. The thing that had kept me going through years of relentless pressure had simply run out.
I'd spent a decade believing the answer to every problem was to push harder. Work longer. Fight more. It's not a bad instinct. It's what gets businesses built and debts repaid and crises survived.
But there's a version of that instinct that turns on you. When pushing becomes the only mode you have. When you've forgotten what you were pushing toward. When harder stops being a strategy and becomes a habit you can't break even when it's costing you everything.
Most people I talk to in their forties and fifties know this feeling. Not necessarily from a business. Maybe from a career that consumed everything. A role they outgrew but kept showing up for. A version of success they achieved and then kept chasing past the point it made sense.
The shift isn't about stopping. It's about recognising when the thing that got you here stops being the thing that takes you forward.
That's what I had to learn the hard way. You don't have to.