Dolly Parton passed away yesterday at 80, and by last night my feed was already full of thoughtful quotes her fans refer to as “Dollyisms, repeated so many times they are remembered. That happens with people who spend seven decades telling the truth in a way nobody minds hearing. You don’t get quoted that much by accident. You get quoted that much because you kept saying things that were simple on the surface and heavy underneath, and people kept needing to hear them.
The line of hers I keep coming back to is “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” I have sat across the table from a lot of professionals and business owners over the years, and the ones who struggle are almost never short on effort. They are short on clarity about what they’re actually building and why. They copied a competitor’s model, took on the kind of clients everyone told them to take, structured the business the way it’s “supposed” to be structured, and then wondered why none of it feels like theirs. Dolly built an empire out of rhinestones and a voice nobody else had, and she never once apologized for either. There is a lesson in that for any attorney running a practice or professional running a company: the version of you that is a slightly toned-down imitation of somebody more successful will never outwork the version of you that actually knows what it’s doing and why.
She also said, “Don’t get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life,” and if you have spent any time around attorneys or entrepreneurs, you know exactly which people that line is aimed at. My profession rewards the person who answers the email at 11 p.m. and bills the extra hour, right up until it doesn’t, right up until that person looks up from the desk and realizes the kids are grown, the marriage is strained, and the calendar has no memory of anything but work. Dolly wrote and performed for decades, built a theme park, ran a business empire, and still managed to be the person everybody describes as warm, present, and generous with her time. That’s not an accident. She never treated the living part as the reward you get after the working part is finished. She did them at the same time, on purpose, the same way she approached everything else.
Put those two sayings together and you get something closer to a business philosophy than a couple of nice quotes for a eulogy. Know who you are well enough to build something that actually reflects it, and build it in a way that leaves room for an actual life while you’re doing it. Most professionals get halfway there. They figure out their niche, their brand, their differentiator, and then they let the making-a-living part swallow everything else anyway. Dolly Parton won’t be remembered for how many hours she logged. She will be remembered for who she was and for showing up as that person in front of everybody, every single day, for all those years. That’s the whole assignment, for a business or a life. Find out who you are, do it on purpose, and don’t forget to actually live while you’re doing it.
