Over the past few months, a number of people have been surprised to find out that I’m trying to build a company right out of college. (“Isn’t that really hard?”, they’d say to me. “Well, yes, it is. It seems very hard as far as I can tell, ” I’d reply.) For good reason, the notion that starting a company is something you do when you’re older prevails.
Others, knowing me to be a thoughtful character, have been curious as to why I chose this path and what lead me to it.
So between various people questioning my decision making and people just being curious, looks like it’s a story I’ve got to tell.
Part I: Positioning is Everything
It’s important to understand one’s strengths and weaknesses. It takes thought, experience, and honesty, but once you can honestly assess yourself, you’ve put yourself in a great position. And positioning is everything.
When I was a junior in college, I decided to turn over a new leaf in the fall semester and really focus on my school work. I did this to a level that didn’t meet my expectations, but I tried very hard. After doing this, my performance didn’t really improve, nor did my satisfaction with my school work. This experience had two outcomes: 1) I could say to myself that I did try and 2) I realized I was positioning myself poorly. I was doing something I didn’t want to do, when I had the opportunity to figure out what I did want to do.
During this time of my life, I began formulating some very important thoughts that were the seed for many of the thoughts you’ll find here at VogelWorks. These thoughts were also very influential in the most important decisions I’ve made over the last few years.
One thought that I’ve already mentioned several times is my Equation of Performance:
Performance = Happiness * Commitment
Here’s another important influence on me, my Equation of Success:
Success = Time Spent Happy/ Total Time on Earth
I realized I wasn’t happy at all doing my work, even if I tried very hard. This isn’t to say any student is ecstatic about their work all the time (in fact, quite the opposite, which is why it took me so long to realize I was facing a real problem). But I eventually realized that few people are as motivated and hardworking as I am and that this somehow disappeared when it came to school work. This tipped me off to a problem I had to fix. I needed to find something I was happy doing so that I could perform and be successful, at least in terms of my definition.
I did a lot of thinking on this back then, and I didn’t quite have all insights until much later. I did figure out the key to solving this problem however. It came to me like this, all my life I’ve been so busy with sports, school, and work that I’ve never taken the time to do something purely out of interest.
Luckily, I was still young enough and still in school, so I could really try and correct this. So I said to myself, I’m motivated and enjoy working. Taking some time to do what I enjoy could be a great move on my part. I won’t waste the time. (I hate wasting time by the way.)
This lead to an important decision of mine. In December of 2007, I decided I still wasn’t going to get a real job. I was going to take the summer to do something I always wanted to do. And for the spring semester of my junior year, I made moves to find a way to do something big.
This was somewhat a bold move back then because for most MIT students, the pre-senior year summer internship was usually the lead-in to your first job. But I already knew I didn’t want a real job.
I was then left with the question: when you’ve got a block of time to do whatever you want, how do you figure out what to do?
Turns out for me, this question wasn’t a problem at all. The funny thing is, my answering this question not only gave me ideas about what to do to prepare for my summer of doing whatever I wanted, it also gave me a lot of direction.
So, assuming you have no money, and don’t enjoy sitting around doing nothing, how do you figure out what to do with free time?
Answering this is easy. All you need is a little creativity. Turns out I have a lot of that.
Kevin
7.29.2009
