I figure there are two kinds of complicated. The first one is positive, it drives someone to devote his life to something extraordinary. A young European Physicist published some radical ideas in a journal back in 1964, then like many others in his field he spent a lifetime working out very complicated theories on subatomic particles. Of course I am talking about Peter Higgs who shared the 2013 Noble Prize with François Englert for the discovery of what is called the “God Particle”. It was an amazing collaboration of resources culminating in a multibillion dollar experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. What transpired was something on a larger scale than anything before or since in human history.What resulted was that the predicted particle was proven to exist.
It is interesting that several of the participating Physicists went on record at the time of the experiments stating that if the Higgs particle did not exist then all of their collective work would have been for nothing. In essence they knew that if the existence of the particle were disproved, everything they had done was essentially meaningless. It is remarkable when you think about it. They had known this all along yet they were willing to risk their precious time in the exploration of knowledge. This is what draws men to endeavor. Whether there will be any practical use for anything that we might learn is unknown. We do it for its own sake.
The second complicated is negative It is where people take on very stressful corporate endeavors like hostile Mergers and Acquisitions or other creative financial maneuvers to scale up empires devouring undervalued assets. It is a curios reality of our age that people devote themselves to such ends all the while knowing for certain that in the grand scheme of humanity their efforts will do very little good. And the tragedy is that some will go so far to flagrantly sacrifice people they care about, to serve others whom they really don’t even like.
Perhaps it is a direct result of our distaste for the brutal nature of major league competitiveness that many people consciously choose a small life. In my generation someone even coined a name for this choice calling it a lifestyle business, something we do to support ourselves and our lifestyle. The sponsoring idea is that such a venture will not be all consuming; it will leave us with the freedom, control, and energy to be better husbands, wives and fathers. I hid behind that vary banner myself for a good many years.
I am now convinced that this idea of a lifestyle business is complete crap.So why the one hundred and eighty degree pivot. Think about it, if we allow ourselves only small dreams than we are effectively resigning ourselves to small lives. That is just a damn shame.
Twice I played it safe building companies in well insulated and unremarkable industries. I built companies where market demand was so thick, opportunities were so plentiful that if I am going to be honest about it, it would have been difficult not to succeed at such ventures. But do not mistake my admission for regret. We all walk our own paths and the one I walked shaped who I am so it is what it is.
Still if we do not recognize our mistakes we are doomed to repeat them. My early career was all about playing it safe. What appeared risky to some was well within my comfort zone. Despite what I told myself, and who I wanted to be, both of my former companies experienced growth year after year despite my best “lifestyle” efforts. You see I had no intention to take those businesses beyond Main Street and so I figured that I could get along just fine without concrete goals for the companies and so I failed to build a guiding structure that would be strong enough to be a foundation for something larger than a mere few locations which I could oversee myself. In both cases there came a point where business began to trespass on my sacred personal time and I resented that. I was extremely busy delivering value and had no effective framework to delegate those responsibilities to other people. Although building such a scale-able business model would become my ambition, that resentment was my first solid clue.
You see the true beauty behind ownership is freedom. However freedom is a double edged sword, if we do very little with that freedom it will in turn yield very little meaning for us. And so if my life’s work has taught me anything it is this: Doing something that you truly love is the most important consideration. And when we commit to something that truly matters to us then we become willing to go to any lengths to build our vision.
It has only when we are willing to put it all on the line to do something that many people would think impossible that enables us to grow and learn an important lesson. Sometimes we also learn that they were right all along, well that might be true in my own case, it remains to be seen, but that is not the lesson. The lesson is this: There is no such thing as a small company, nor are there any small persons. There are only small ideas.
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