The ad shows a slough of attractive people smiling and laughing together while eating a meal, watching a sunset, and taking a walk along a tree-lined path. Their activities are the fairy tale for many busy single professionals who just can’t seem to find the time outside of their crammed schedules to court a potential partner, yet long to experience these scenarios with someone special.
Enter It’s Just Lunch, the world’s #1 matchmaking and dating service (according to their website). The concept is straightforward and simple: have lunch with someone and if you like them, you can see them again. If not, next.
Anyone who has been through the dating process (and who hasn’t?) knows how wide the gap is between finding someone you’d like to see again on a second date — and frolicking with your sweetie through a meadow with daisy chains in hand after renewing your vows for the third time.
That gap is fraught with high expectations, massive disappointments, and occasionally, bitter heartbreak.
Which is why one of two things often happen: we get hooked on looking and never make a commitment, or we shield ourselves from the pain of disappointment and create expectations that are impossible to meet.
The challenge with both of these approaches to dating is the same problem it is for building a stable, long term business or career. They both keep us stuck. They both keep us secretly yearning for the happily ever after without doing the work it takes to get there.
Building a sustainable, satisfying business or career follows a similar path as finding a mate. Sometimes the longing for “walking hand in hand with the love of our life” right out of the gate blinds us into believing we want to skip the courtship phase altogether and rush right into what seems to not be as much work. The part where we can finish each other’s sentences or glance across the room and know exactly what that “look” on our beloved’s face means.
The part that’s comfortable, second nature, easy.
But here’s the problem with easy.
What’s become too easy in today’s world is to be uncommitted. The culture perpetuates a state of dis-ease, which leads to all manners of bad habits. We can switch gears with the click of a mouse, hire a brilliant copywriter to transform us from the thing we are today to what we’d like to be tomorrow, buy a “divorce kit” for $199 online, no lawyer necessary if we want to run off with the secretary or pool boy. The mantra of “Opportunities Abound!” is shouted across the Internet in 140 characters or less, billions of times a day.
While easy has its place (opening a pickle jar, for example), it’s not that gratifying for the bigs things. For the things that matter. For the long run.Talk to anyone who has successfully built a great business or a long term relationship and they’ll be the first to say the journey wasn’t without its rough parts. But if given the chance, they’d be first in line to do it all again.
