Two weeks ago I walked a portion of the Camino de Santiago through northern Spain with my brothers-in-law and my closest friend from Costa Rica.
Nine days. Vineyards. Mountain terrain. Ninety-five degrees on the hottest afternoons. One day I covered close to eighteen miles and climbed almost a thousand feet on grades steep enough that I had to lean into the trail. My feet ached. My hips ached, and my shoulders ached from the pack. And when I got to the top of the mountain the pilgrims call the Mountain of Forgiveness, I sat on a rock and cried.
I came back to my Lifedge team meeting yesterday and shared what the trip taught me. I want to write it down here too, because most of it applies as much to how we run a business as it does to how we walk across a country.
There are six things.
One. Comfort Is the Default, and It Is Quietly Making Us Weaker
I don’t know when the last time was that most of us walked ten miles. Most of us weren’t built for that. We were built for comfort. Our cars are more comfortable, our chairs are more comfortable, and our climates are controlled to the degree. Our food is delivered, and our conversations are asynchronous.
There is a book on my team’s reading list right now called The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter that makes exactly this point at length. When you take away hard things from a life on purpose, you don’t get a happier life. You get a smaller one.
Walking through the heat with blisters, carrying my own weight, drinking warm water because the cold ran out miles ago, is not something I would have chosen if the trail had offered a shortcut. But I came back stronger, not just physically. I came back reminded that doing hard things on purpose is how a person stays whole.
I think about that at work. Lifedge is not a place where we chase comfort for ourselves or for our clients. We choose the hard conversations. The clarifying decisions. The unglamorous foundational work. That is not a bug. That is the point.
Two. Relationships Are Built by the Miles, Not by the Milestones
Some days on the Camino, we walked single file, and some days we walked side by side. Some days the conversation was surface, and some days it was the kind that only happens when you’re both too tired to lie.
My friend from Costa Rica was carrying something heavy on the trip. Somewhere on a hillside in Spain, halfway through a long day, we cried together. And in that moment I remembered something I want to say clearly to anyone reading this. Just because you have twenty or twenty-five years of anniversaries with your wife doesn’t mean you are going to have twenty-six. You still have to put the work in.
The same is true for teams, for client relationships, and for friendships. Every relationship you have is being renewed or eroded by what you do this month. It is never on autopilot.
Intentional relationships. Intentional conversations. Say it out loud. Put it on the calendar. Walk the miles.
Three. Solitude, if You Let It, Tells You What Actually Matters
Not every hour of the Camino was in conversation. There were long stretches where I walked alone through vineyards and dry hills, and God met me on those stretches in a way that only happens when you have silenced the noise.
I prayed for my wife, my kids, and my parents. And I prayed for the Lifedge team, one by one, walking down the list I keep in my head.
If you never carve out the space to be quiet, you never get to hear what the important things are. Everything just competes for your attention at the same volume. Silence is what turns the volume down on the trivial so the essential can be heard.
Four. When You Unplug for Nine Days, You Find Out What Really Matters
When I got back, someone asked me what I missed. Here’s what I noticed. I did not miss my inbox, the notifications, or the meetings I had rescheduled.
What I missed was my wife, my kids, my faith, and my team.
That is the actual list. Everything else that fills my calendar is scaffolding around those four things. If any of them starts to weaken, the scaffolding cannot hold the building up.
When I got back, I told the team: what God has given us at Lifedge is that fourth thing. It is not everything. It is not the point of my life. But it is part of what I am called to steward well.
Five. Life Is a Marathon, Not a Sprint. And “Close” on a Map Is Not Close on Foot
The town we finished each day looked, on the map, like something you could reach in about eight minutes by car. It took us two hours and forty-five minutes to walk there. Sometimes more.
That is a picture of almost everything worth doing in a business.
The destination looks close, but the map is deceiving. The distance between where you are and where you want to be is longer than it appears, and you cover it by putting one foot in front of the other, for hours, when nothing about the landscape seems to be changing.
Businesses that grow the most are almost never the ones sprinting. They’re the ones walking, day after day, year after year, until suddenly they look up and realize they have reached somewhere they couldn’t see when they started.
Six. Encouragement Compounds. Especially When It Comes From Home
The trip organizer had asked our loved ones to send us letters before we left, sealed, to be opened at a particular point along the trail.
I sat down on the trail on the day I was supposed to open mine, and I read my mother’s letter. She had written out Psalm 121.
I lift up my eyes to the mountains. Where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.
I cried again.
Encouragement, real encouragement, is not a comment on a social media post. It is a note that says “I see you, I know what you are carrying, and here is what I want you to remember while you carry it.” That kind of encouragement compounds in a person for years.
I want Lifedge to be that kind of place for the people who work here and for the clients we serve. Not a place where people come with something and leave with more of it. A place where people come with something and leave encouraged.
What I Hope You Take From All of This
You do not have to walk the Camino to run into any of these six things. You can find them in a conversation, in a quiet morning, in a hard project, in a hard year.
But I do think most of us, most of the time, are running the opposite pattern. We chase comfort, and we let relationships drift. We fill silence with more noise, we forget what actually matters, and we treat our biggest goals like sprints. And we underestimate how much a single note from someone we love could carry us through the hard season we’re standing in the middle of.
If any of that lands on you today, take a small step in the other direction this week. Something hard on purpose. A conversation you have been avoiding. Ten minutes of quiet. A letter, written by hand, to someone you love who could use it.
You’ll be amazed at what changes.
If you want to talk about any of this, or just about how to bring some of it into your own work, reply to this post or send us a note. I’d love to walk through it with you.
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