Stressed at work, happy at home

Hello Predictable Revenue community,

A few weeks ago, a client asked me something that stopped me in my tracks: "Collin, how can you be stressed all day at work and then show up as a happy dad at night?"

Honestly, I couldn't pinpoint it in the moment. It's one of those things you do instinctively without really understanding the mechanics behind it. But then I received a thoughtful reply from a reader named Siddhartha to my recent "rollercoaster" post, and something clicked.

His message included a simple framework he uses to evaluate his life decisions – and suddenly the pieces fell into place. The answer to my client's question wasn't just one thing, but it started with a tool I'd discovered back in 2020 that changed how I think about success, happiness, and what actually matters.

But first, let me share something that happened 13 years ago that surprised me and put me onto this journey.

The Great Income Experiment I Didn't Know I Was Running

When I quit my job to start my first company, I went from six figures to zero figures overnight. This was a new experience for me because I had been working 4 days a week since high school. I even worked all through university and was a full time sales rep making pretty good coin for 3 years of it. That is to say, I had adjusted to a life where cash was always plentiful.

But an interesting thing happened after my salary went to 0, nothing. I thought I would have been miserable but I wasn’t. I was happier than I had been in the last 5 years. I was stressed about money, sure, but I was also energized by possibility in a way I hadn't felt in years.

This made no sense to me at the time. I went from upper class income to well below the poverty line. Shouldn't losing all my income have made me demonstrably less happy? Yet here I was, unable to afford to buy meat and feeling more alive than I had during my well-paid corporate days.

It opened my eyes to the fact that money wasn’t everything. And, despite the fact that I had made a lot of it, I didn’t really care that much about it. It was a very odd feeling for someone who saw themselves as a coin-operated salesperson.

The Grocery Store Epiphany

I don’t want to flex but just a few years after starting the company, I was able to afford groceries again. But my co-founder and CTO, who had just moved from a small town 90 minutes outside Vancouver to downtown to be closer to our team, was struggling. He was feeling so tight that it became a massive distraction. He even admitted to me he was considering taking on side contracts just to make ends meet.

I noticed that while I was feeling good about our finances, he was still feeling the stress. Here's the thing: we were both earning what I considered decent money. The difference was that I had the advantage of a dual-income household with my future wife working and sharing the load. I had just risen above what I now call the "grocery store level" because of my wife's income, but he was stuck under it.

The grocery store level is simple: if you can buy groceries without checking your bank account first, you've hit the threshold where money stops being a daily anxiety. Below that line, financial stress bleeds into every other area of your life. Above it, money becomes a tool rather than an obsession.

The Grateful Dead Level

But there's another level beyond just grocery store comfort, and it's perfectly captured by a 1987 press conference quote from Grateful Dead's Bob Weir. When asked if success had spoiled the band, Bobby replied: "I was noticing the other night, for instance, that when I'm going through pistachios – the hard-to-open ones, I don't bother with them any more."

That's the Grateful Dead level – when you've hit enough financial comfort that you can afford to be slightly wasteful with small things. You don't stress about the hard-to-open pistachios. You don't calculate the per-ounce cost of different cereals. You buy meat without thinking about it.

It's not about being rich – it's about having enough buffer that money doesn't occupy mental real estate on the small stuff.

The Dashboard That Changed Everything

Fast forward to 2020, I was part of an entrepreneur group led by my friend Spencer. During one of our sessions, he introduced us to something he called a "Quality of Life Dashboard" – a simple way to track multiple dimensions of life instead of just obsessing over revenue numbers.

The concept was revolutionary in its simplicity: rate different areas of your life on a scale of 1-10, and suddenly you realize that your happiness isn't just one number – it's the sum of many parts.

Here's what my dashboard looked like the last week I was in the group (it’s been a while):

The magic isn't in the numbers themselves – it's in the perspective they provide. Even when business stress hits a 3, I can see that family is at a 9, my relationship is solid at an 8, and my mental health toolkit is keeping me at a 7.

Life isn't one row on a spreadsheet. It's all of them.

The Compartmentalization Secret

Back to my client's question about showing up as a happy dad despite work stress. It wasn't until Siddhartha's reply to my rollercoaster email triggered this reflection that I could articulate it properly. The dashboard didn't create my ability to compartmentalize – but it gave me the framework to understand and improve it.

The key insight is that compartmentalization isn't about suppressing emotions or pretending problems don't exist. It's about recognizing that your life has multiple accounts, and a deficit in one doesn't have to bankrupt the others.

When work stress hits, I use the dashboard as a mental model and remind myself: "My life isn't one row." I'll repeat this phrase to myself multiple times a day during stressful periods. Sometimes I'll mentally run through the scores for each category: "Work might be a 4 right now, but family is a 9, my health is a 7, and my relationship is an 8. I'm not failing at life – I'm just having a hard week."

This simple mantra – "my life isn't one row" – has become my go-to reality check. Slowly, it helped me keep the different areas of my life in their boxes. Instead of letting work anxiety contaminate dinner conversations, I can acknowledge the stress while still being present for what's going well. The kid who wants to show me their Lego creation doesn't need to hear about cash flow problems. The wife who had a great day at work doesn't need my business anxiety to kill her mood.

The dashboard doesn't eliminate the stress – it contains it. It prevents one bad area from convincing you that everything is falling apart.

Your Turn

If you're struggling with compartmentalization, try building your own dashboard. Pick 5-7 areas that matter to you and rate them weekly. The specific categories matter less than the practice of measuring multiple dimensions of success.

Some weeks, work will dominate your anxiety. Other weeks, family stress will spike, or health issues will demand attention. But when you see your life as a portfolio rather than a single stock, you realize that diversification isn't just a financial strategy – it's a happiness strategy.

And remember: the goal isn't to optimize everything to a 10. It's to ensure that when one area hits a 3, you have enough 7s, 8s, and 9s to keep your overall life satisfaction positive.

The question isn't whether you'll face stress – it's whether you'll let that stress define your entire experience.

Start measuring what matters. Your happiness depends on it.

Collin

P.S. What would be on your Quality of Life Dashboard? I'd love to hear what dimensions matter most to you. Sometimes the best insights come from seeing how others structure their happiness.