Oh the places we’ll go
I ‘ve always had a drive to go out and do crazy insane things other people deemed impossible. It excited it me when people told me that I couldn’t do something, and its gotten me into plenty of trouble. But lately I’ve been feeling lost and a bit overwhelmed with everything in the world.
Just a couple years ago I was a naive teenager who was blooming with ideas. And as I went though college, that drive moved out of focus. I started questioning what I knew and what I could do. All the ideas that I ever had were becoming reality and I wasn’t the one in charge of bring them to the world.
I built a Google Glass before there was one to talk about. I built a VR headset from a Samsung Galaxy S4 before it was the GearVR. I built a 3d printer that beat out all the competition a hundred fold two years before CES 2016. I saw the world slip away from me one idea at a time.
I started blaming the world. When that didn’t change things I embarked on a journey to discover who I was, and what I could do again. My theory: I was a kid playing in the ocean with a toy boat competing with Cruise lines. I had the concepts, I just didn’t have the resources and the guts to scale up.
Through those months, I had lost touch with reality. And when I came back, the world had left me in the dust. I couldn’t compete in a world where my competitors had billions, trillions of dollars. A world where they had years of experience and a lifetime of a head start.
The most important aspect of my success were that I focused on things other people didn’t. I didn’t care what other people at the time thought of my ideas. I could see where the world was going to go. When people laughed at me it was because they couldn’t see where tech would go. Maybe I didn’t see it as I’m imagining it right now, but I was onto something. That’s what made me successful in the first place.
At-least I’d like to tell myself that last paragraph is all true. But I know deep down it isn’t. I had no freaking idea what the future held. I was as clueless as everyone else. Instead of thinking, I just made things that I thought were cool.
Maybe that’s the secret. Make things, not care about what people think, and have a little bit of fun along the way. Let that inner five year old loose.
In other-words love myself and what I do.
