While many CAN, some DO
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about motivation. What is it that makes some people willing to push themselves to the breaking point? Why doesn’t everyone have that drive?
Mostly I’m curious about the subject because I have an 11 year old daughter and I’m trying to inspire her to think big, dream big. Think Different. I wish I could go back now to talk to my 11 year old self and give that shy young man a pep talk.
So when news of Steve Jobs passing away exploded on Twitter yesterday as we were sitting down to dinner it was all I could do to stay composed in front of the kids and I didn’t even know the man. He was my childhood hero. Steve was the ultimate Doer, the very definition of a driven individual with an unwavering belief in himself and what he was building and he was an inspiration to millions of young geeks.
When I was 5 my family bought an Apple II and I learned to write BASIC programs. I wrote a number guessing game for my younger sister after learning how to generate random integers in a magazine. My dad and I soldered a new resistor onto the motherboard to replace a faulty potentiometer that controlled the brightness of the display. We punched holes in floppy disks. I hacked my SE/30 and my Performa with ResEdit. I removed all the vowels from a friends keyboard mapping as a prank. I built games with Hypercard. I wrote music on a NeXT cube using CSound.
I remember hearing stories about the groups of computer enthusiasts that built the first personal computers and the first switches and routers. I was fascinated by the idea that two men in a garage could start a company that could challenge the giants of industry.
When I started my own company a few years ago I knew I was up against formidable odds. Pursuing companies with a 5 year head start and millions in revenue from my couch didn’t seem crazy to me and that’s because of the trail that was blazed many years before by brave, driven people.
My company ultimately failed when my co-founder and I stopped pushing ourselves but I never regretted starting it or closing it down. Ultimately if you don’t believe in your idea then nobody else will either and you shouldn’t be doing it.
Here’s the thing. You only have so much time. Spend it doing something that gets you fired up. If somebody has to push you to do something, you’re doing the wrong thing. I left my Fortune500 job a couple of years ago because I had been there for 6 years ( a huge chunk of my life) and it wasn’t going anywhere. It needed to be about more than a paycheck for me.
Do Something. Be Something. Rest in Peace, Steve.
