ninety days of chemo and who sets the shift

a founder told me his oncologist handed him a form. write a letter to your employer requesting medical leave.

he looked at it and said there is nobody to write the letter to. it would be me.

so he worked. ninety consecutive days through chemotherapy, four or five hours most days, from a chair he could not get out of quickly.

i asked whether that was the worst year of his life. he said no. he said it might be the best thing that ever happened to him, because it reorganised what he thought mattered in about a week and the new order stuck.

then he said the part i keep chewing on. if i worked at a store, my manager sets my shift. if i did not want to work nights, that is still my shift. instead i had a company pointing me somewhere every morning and complete control over when. that is one of the real powers of doing this and nobody puts it in the brochure.

we sell this life on upside. equity, freedom, the exit. he found the actual payoff at the worst possible moment: when your body starts setting the schedule, owning the schedule is not a perk, it is the whole thing.

what would your work look like if your body picked the hours next month?