You can’t know what you are capable of until you place yourself in a position where you are required to show it.

I’ve discovered this one adage to be true. I’ve complained for years about what others should do, what my former company was capable of doing… hell I even tried to build prototypes to encourage a new direction. At some point, though, I had to be willing to either do something, or stop bitching. Sounds easy enough to say, even to start planning. So why do so few people really do it? Because of the title of this blog… free coffee, smart people, yadda yadda yadda

Seriously though, you have to ask yourself… can you *really* do what you are saying? how sure are you? Would you bet your job on it? Would you bet your house on it? What about your marriage?

The reality of going to a brand new start up (and I mean one in the round A funding, not that cushy new SF building with 100 people and 200 egos), is that you are going to face bigger, harder, more potentially disastrous challenges than you have ever faced. As an engineer, you aren’t going to have an IT department to bitch about. Marketing will really *have* to understand the product. And so on.

So now, you have to ask yourself… can you *REALLY* do it?

Hopefully that was a mighty “HELL YES!” bursting forth. Otherwise, keep your job.

I say these things because, more than I expected, I was given a thumbs up when I left my last job. People had a glint of envy and wishful thoughts in their eyes. I was exceptionally fortunate to have worked with some of the finest people in the industry, yet I still think there was a great degree of misunderstanding.

So… what?

Ok, enough of the discouraging talk about going to a start up… that’s actually not my intention for the blog. I just wanted to bring the heads out of the clouds about what going at it on your own (or virtually on your own) really means.

Here is what my daily life has become, work work work work, drink, work, fix, work, sleep. Truth is though… it’s awesome. I love doing this stuff because you do get to dictate every feature, every concept, every piece of the product. You have a good idea? Well do it! No one to reap the glory but you.

So back to my opening adage… I am absolutely serious about this. Life has very few moments where you can take control of it and risk a lot to really see what you can do. I believe that everyone reading this truly doesn’t think of themselves as insignificant. We are all the main actors in our own movie. We all want our lives, our ideas, our moments of pure (self-recognized) genius to mean something. You do need to find some outlet for that. If your job, or your family, affords you that outlet that may be sufficient. But if your dreams are bigger, you need to set that internal thermostat of happiness a bit higher, and push yourself. Mostly because no one else will so kindly motivate you as you do yourself.

Someone once said to me, if you look back on your life, and you don’t accomplish this one thing (whatever it may be), how would you feel. Of course you’d feel bad, but how bad? Ok, now remember that feeling. Write it down, talk about it, think about it, most importantly feeeeeel it. Just like your stomach hurts when you don’t eat, that feeling is your soul telling you it’s hungry. It needs this accomplishment to be fulfilled. If you don’t listen, you will know something far worse years later… regret.

About this Blog:

The goal of this writing is to share thoughts, inspiration, sweet code, and other magical berries of wisdom that may come out of this life as the sole engineer in a three musketeers company.

Hopefully some of what I say is valuable, and possibly even entertaining, and most of all: inspiring. I do believe we all are capable of far more than what we give ourselves the chance to be. We have a lot of alternatives to releasing that inner tiger that tend to satiate our real desire to be something spectacular. I hope to boldify a few to take a chance.