I was working with an incredibly senior leader this week. As we settled into our meeting, he asked how I was doing.
"Honestly,” I said, “I'm really tired, but feeling really good about where things are heading".
He laughed.
"You're tired? You should try my job! I'm always tired!"
It got me thinking: tiredness gets a bad rap. We walk about it as if it’s always a warning indicator, a sign to stop, that something is wrong. Sometimes, of course, that’s exactly what it is.
But tiredness can also be the receipt in return for doing work that matters. At this time of year, that’s the tiredness a lot of us are carrying.
In the northern hemisphere, it's the end of the school year. Teachers are tired. Leaders are tired. Students are tired. Parents are tired of everyone else being tired.
Even if you don't work in a school, there's an almost parasitic fatigue that drifts over from our teacher friends and our own kids at school.
And in the southern hemisphere, it's not only winter - it's only halfway through the year!
So what can we do with the tired we might be feeling?
Anne Lamott wrote about the importance of "Shitty First Drafts", something Brené Brown popularised further. In short: the best writers you love reading rarely pump that stuff out first time around. They need to write an awful, imperfect first draft to have something to work with on a decent second draft. If they give it a third go they'll end up with something brilliant.
So rather than tired equalling the need to do nothing, being tired can also be a signal to start something, even if it's a tired, shitty first draft that you produce.
Because you'll come back to it when you're less tired, grateful that Tired You got that shitty first draft out of the way.
Write the tired draft.
Sketch out the tired strategic plan.
Make the tired list.
Record the tired podcast.
Open the tired Google Doc and put anything, however tired it is, on a page.
This is not a call to hustle through sheer exhaustion. I don’t want to see any badge-of-honour for burning yourself out in public.
I’m hoping you see it’s a smaller, kinder provocation than that:
Don’t waste your tired.
When you have no energy for brilliance, create the raw material.
When you have no capacity for polish, make the mess.
When your brain refuses to produce the final answer, ask it for the first sentence.
Over the next few weeks of a Scottish summer (that said, it could last days), we'll revisit some of the old, tired archive of the Provocation. Maybe the second draft we write will teach us something new.