Obstacles

You see all these wildly successful entrepreneurs in the news. They seem like overnight successes, but thats very rarely the case. All those articles and interviews focus on the glamour and fast life that they NOW lead, but they hardly delve into the gritty reality of what it takes to get there. Billionaire Mark Cuban began poor and "eating mustard and ketchup sandwiches, living with five other guys in a 3-bedroom apartment". He lived the life very few wanted, so that he could someday live the life very few could have. 

This wasn't very clear to me until I graduated college and began simultaneously working on a career and building an internet startup called Denarri. Naive younger me thought that a novel idea and some motivation was all it took to create something big and change the world. Like clockwork, reality came around and decided to teach me that life is never that simple. Building a website as complex as Denarri has proved to be quite a challenge, which is expected. What wasn't so expected, was the seemingly never ending obstacles that keep getting thrown our way.

Our ideal "summer of Denarri" had our whole team working night and day in my cousins basement to launch this website, the typical startup hustle story. Slowly but surely, those plans fell through when the tenant of that basement refused to leave. On top of that, our lead programmer was accepted into a prestigious internship at NASA, something I would never ask him to turn down. This meant that he would be at NASA during the day, and programming at night. We had gone from all working together in one basement, to being split up between New York, California, and Florida, and working on it remotely. Not ideal, but better than nothing. 

Even as I write this post, more obstacles continue to barrel in our direction, whether it be family related, academically related (having 2/3 of your team dealing with a Johns Hopkins workload is trying), or life being its beautifully inconvenient self. Job applications are also much more time consuming than I had expected. Thankfully, I have wonderful people in my life that will support me through all of it, every step of the way. I have no complaints.

I met a guy at Starbucks who was coincidentally working on his own startup, and the one piece of advice he gave to my wide eyed hungry self was "no matter how hard and fast life throws you those curveballs, never stop working on Denarri". 

The way I see it, the best things in life are the things worth fighting for. That goes for love, success, happiness, you name it. 

My parents sacrificed more than I could ever imagine to provide me with the life I have now. I will settle for nothing less than success, in every sense of the word, so that I can give my parents everything they've wanted but couldn't have, my future wife and children the best life I can possibly give them, and myself the satisfaction of knowing I proved everyone wrong. 

Passively Passionate

Passively Passionate. Comes off as an oxymoron, right? Those who are passionate about what they do, whether it be a hobby, career, love, etc. are thought of as ferociously active in how they portray it to the outside world. You'd be hard pressed to find a single person in their life that doesn't have at least a small idea of what they're working on. They exude passion in how they talk about their goals, what they say in person and online, and their overall body language.

I'm not that guy. I do things a bit differently. Don't get me wrong, when I find something I truly care about, which lately has been primarily loved ones and career aspirations, I live and breath that thing. I devote all my time and energy into working on this goal, and I let nothing distract me. However, I do it quietly. I don't speak of my passions unless I am asked. Even then, I do everything I can to prevent myself from hyping it up.

Why do I do this? For one thing, all that time spent talking up a big game about my future accomplishments, would  be better used to make those accomplishments come to fruition. Also, I'm a firm believer in letting your talent speak for itself. Many say that telling a lot of people about your goals means you have to back up the talk, which encourages you to work that much harder. My response to that is, if someone doesn't have enough self motivation to accomplish their goals, they won't last. Simple as that.