Sell your services to the company store, but not your soul. In company towns, there was always a company store selling goods at high prices and always willing to extend credit to get you more deply mired in their debt. In our service-oriented world, the company store takes on a different, more psychological character of servitude.

A friend who just started a new job told me today she thinks constantly of her work…when she wakes up at night and during her hourly commute each way to her job. These thoughts are a giant python squeezing out her personal creative projects. she’s begun to see her creative life as indefinitely on hold, or at least until she can get enough money ahead that she can become creatively independent once more.

We spoke of ways to break this all or nothing cycle which sounds so familiar to many of us, no? She’s started to sell her soul to the company store. But, they did not contract for her soul–only her professional services.

Save some of that juice for yourself, honey, and for the work that only you can do…on your own time and from your own storehouse.

[Cultural note: “In the 1960’s Tennessee Ernie Ford recorded a country ballad, Sixteen Tons,that stayed number one on the pop and country charts for months. It captured the almost forgotten plight of the company owned miner: You haul sixteen tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. Saint Peter don’t you call me for I can’t go, I owe my soul to the company store.” (C. Robert Allred, Th.D., Pastor,1998).]