Happy New Year to everyone! Hope everyone is looking forward to a great 2011 and has set some big goals for the coming year. Before I set my resolution, I always take some time to look back at the
previous year. A lot happened during 2010. Here’s what I accomplished and some significant things that happened:
1) I moved out of the abandoned Frat House. This may sound like great news, but I don’t consider it to be (particularly since I have no qualms about living for free in an empty fraternity house). Back in 2009, the fraternity I had been a part of when I was in school was expelled from campus (long story…….) As a recent alum, I was eventually asked to keep watch over the house since no one could live there. During that time, I enjoyed some much needed free housing and the company of a small community of “zero-stage” entrepreneurs that I invited to work there. Around May of this past year, MIT took over our House, and I had to move out.
2) I worked as a furniture mover and rode my seat-less bike through the freezing Boston winter morning at 6AM (up hill both ways of course) in order to get to work. It’s true. I did that. This year. After graduating from MIT.
3) Vogel Labs was born. Since it seemed imminent that MIT was going to take over the House, I started trying to find a way for this working community I had started to persist. Being able to work alongside a community of people was so important to me that I had to find a way to keep this going for myself and find a way to make it available to other people in similar situations (people working by themselves or with a few other people that were trying to accomplish something important). Our connections to other people make or break us, and if you’re trying to do something difficult, close connections to other people working to achieve something is extremely powerful. With some help from Microsoft and Cooley, I was able to get started delivering a dose of community to people. The concept has evolved but that was the root of it all.
4) I met a lot of good people. Jason Evanish, Praful Mathur, Bill Warner, Antonio Rodriguez, and many others come to mind. I had the chance to meet the partners of Union Square Ventures, a group of smart guys who recognized, just as I did, that I didn’t belong on the investment side of the table. I belong making and building things. As strange as many people may find it, I was very happy to be turned down for the job right in the middle of that meeting.
5) I took a “real” job (of sorts). It’s true. I now work for an established company. Funny thing is, and to no surprise, my position in this particular group within the company is equivalent, in most respects, to working in a funded startup.
6) I further pursued a concept that has been compelling me for years. I’ll talk more about this later. The point was that I seized the time to continue studying something that compelled me.
7) I continued my blogging. For quite a while, I was writing a post every day. I also wrote a few articles for Greenhorn Connect (a Boston Startup Resource) and Xconomy (a Boston Tech blog). I was asked to write for the MIT Entrepreneurship Forum after they came across my blog on Google, although I haven’t gotten around to doing that yet. The blog has been a great resource: it has allowed me to crystallize my thoughts, re-connect with people, meet new people, get job interviews, and get help with my projects.
8) I bought a car and went further into the dreaded “debt trap.” But, it was a good investment that I’m happy with.
9) For the first time, I went to a country where English isn’t the primary language and where they have nude beaches. I also had to drive a manual transmission for the first time from Barcelona to Nice, France. That was challenging. My first interaction with the French was someone yelling and shaking their fist at me because I had stalled several times in front of them.
10) I published as a physical book The 5 Things to Learn in This Life, a series of thoughtful essays written by my friend Luis Fernandez. The story behind these essays always impressed me (my friend wrote them over a period of years due to an off the cuff question from me), plus I think the content is excellent.
11) I published my own book — 10 Powerful Personas. I originally started down the rabbit hole of writing a book to learn more about publishing. I also did it for practice: I’ve always had a feeling that a lifetime of thought and ideas was going to lead me to writing multiple books, so I figured I’d go ahead and try. I originally thought I could write a solid draft of a short discussion of the topic in a few weeks….. I completely underestimated the amount of thought, time, focus, and effort such an exploit would require and just how much complexity scales with the number of words in a written work.
Needless to say the process was humbling. I set a deadline for myself, sucked it up, and made myself kick what I’d created out the door. To be honest, although there is a lot of good stuff within those pages, the “final” product is mediocre at best (I should share one caveat: I have very high expectations for things so you may still like it and should buy it anyway ;)
But, I’ve reaped many very real benefits from doing this. This subject deserves a separate blog post. But, here’s a few key points that I learned or were re-enforced by my foray into authorship: making something takes a lot of work, making something beautiful takes exponentially more; not everything you make will be “good”; making something is an emotional process, you have an attachment to it (whether you want to or not) and it reflects upon you; there is no product you can make that is more personal than a book, it’s your thoughts.
So how did I grow in 2010? what changed? As impatient as I am, and as much as I always want to get moredone, I really did accomplish a lot. After spending more time pursuing what I wanted, thinking, and struggling a bit, I’ve developed a strong sense of purpose, which is something that many people are still searching for. And after living in an abandoned frat house, after coming off of having my company fail late in 2009, after having no money and working as a mover, after writing a book, after being criticized more than once, I fear nothing in my future working life (I’m certainly still afraid of deep ocean water and sky diving). Nothing will be as hard as this bundle of things.
I’m not sure I could have asked for much more in 2010, but there’s plenty to be done in 2011. Time to set those plans and my resolution…..
-Kevin
1.6.2010
