Since I started my own company, live is different. I could not believe that it feels like a never ending roller coaster, but now it seems to accelerate, and – I am afraid – this is only the beginning.
Everything takes longer than expected, but it does not matter, because we decided to stay.
Nothing counts more than finishing the next milestone, the next thing we want to get out. No loud voice – we have nothing to show you yet - but every day with new motivation and self-encouragement.
And this perspective seems to change everything. Now, any new day is also a completely different day. There is no repeating work; there are no stupid things to do; we are struggling to work out the right strategy to create products that pay off.
But something else is going on: My Identity seems to change.
Frustrations are getting more common, but so are small successes. Over and over again, this shifts my perspective who I am and what I really want.
For example: it shifts my Identity seeing how I fail at answering a Stackoverflow question just because I am not thinking detailed enough about a particular topic, thereby recognizing that I seem to be a more pragmatic guy:
If I have to, I can dig into the details, but essentially, they are not important to me, but the results are.
Another one is the scale of our application we are developing, it is large – relative to our small company – and I wish every day, that we had started a little smaller, because the next great thing may look like a toy. But ours isn’t one. I am sorry, we are not lean, we are Germans, and we tend to over engineer. Our app will have most of the features people need, in the first version, and we took a long time to develop it. Sigh. Perspective shifted and my Identity changes again. Am I stalled being German, just kidding... not sure.
Simple, small components, connected to each other, this is the way we need to develop, step by step, Actor by Actor, Interface by Interface. But wouldn’t that be a violation of Conway’s law for small companies?
For fun, I’ve set up an iPad development environment. A new platform, everything feels simple and straightforward like my early days on the Amiga. Noone (except we geeks) needs multitasking anymore. We all tried, but our brains refused to adjust. And how proud we were back then in the 80s. Single tasking platforms may be capable to change everything about how “normal” people use computers. I’d like to participate, but it must stay part of my weekend fun. Another Identification shift… I am getting dizzy….
I am starting to love exponential change, I have to.
There is no parachute attached to the roller coaster, but actually, I’m missing rocket boosters.