I am on one of the more challenging legs of my journey at the moment. I am in the midst of launching a company and have been in “go” mode a lot more than usual lately. Founding a tech startup has been an adventure I have know for years that I would partake in but it has been nothing like what I had expected.
Like many of the relationships I have had in the past, the most interesting and rewarding part of my relationship with my business has has been the highs and lows. My other bucket lists have inspired and enriched me in other ways but the emotional highs and lows of starting a company stand out in their unmatchable range. Summiting a mountain is fantastic but it is not the same emotional victory as pushing something that existed only in my head out in an interactive form to the entire world. The difference is that this same high is commonly matched with an equally strong low just minutes after moving forward and realizing I just broke my creation. (This happens several times a day. Mostly in a staging environment ;-p)
I am constantly learning new things about code, business and communication processes. I am a big fan of processes (you are reading this on a site called Life Listed after all ;-p) and it has been a lot of fun figuring out both what I need to do and how the heck I am going to do it. More so than in any other project in my life, trying to start a company has put me in situations where I don’t only not know what to do but I also do not know what questions to ask. It is confusing but I am much happier for it.
Even though the numbers in my analytics are low (we haven’t formally launched yet. Thus the lack of a URL in this post. Stay tuned!), the reports are more exciting than the client reports I have analyzed that have show tens of millions of visitors. The reason for this is pretty straightforward. These reports are mine.
One of the odder parts of this experience is that the whole thing is really just a smaller side effect of my bucket list. I am starting a company because I want to give myself the professional flexibility needed to finish my list. It is an attempt to increase my two most important resources (time and money) in the long term by sacrificing the same resources in the short term. It is a gamble that is going to take years to learn if I will ever see rewards.
That is the thing I like most about making my bucket list my highest priority. It regularly leads to side effects that make me a better person. That is a far better result than anything I could have planned.
