The Over-Functioning Machine

This is about the person (usually an entrepreneur) who has built something impressive and cannot stop tending it. Not because it requires them to; often it would run better if they stepped back, but because somewhere underneath is the conviction that if they ever stopped, the whole thing would collapse, and people would see them for who they really are.

And I have observed this not only in the world of entrepreneurship, but it has been relayed to me by Patrick; someone who works in the corporate world with CEOs and leaders at the top of their game, working for the likes of J.P Morgan, and so on. The leaders who cannot stop.

They over-function. They pour in, and pour in, and the pouring never ceases, because its real purpose was never the business. Its purpose was to keep a fear at bay. The work is a machine built, in part, to outrun being 'found out', being seen, dropping the ball.

The cruelty of it is, in Patrick's words that 'the success cannot be felt'. You would think that building something substantial and successful would quiet the fear; proof, finally, of worth. It doesn't. Because the achievement is read, internally, not as evidence that the fear was wrong, but as the thing that is barely, exhaustingly, holding the fear off. Stop, and it returns.

So the more they build, the more there is to defend, more at stake, and the less of it they can actually enjoy. The reward for the effort is more effort.

You cannot fix this with strategy. No restructure, no delegation plan, no system reaches it, because the over-functioning isn't an operational habit or response. It is emotional, and it will therefore defeat every operational solution deployed against it. The freed time simply fills back up.

What reaches it is naming it: seeing that the effort-without-ceasing is doing a different job than the one it claims to. That doesn't dissolve the fear. But it separates the person from the machine for long enough to experience a revelation, a lightness, and to maybe be able to ask whether the thing really would collapse if they stopped. And to notice, usually, that the only thing that would collapse is the defence. Because the business was never the fragile part.