I was out to dinner the other night celebrating the college graduation of a good friend. Graduation season is always interesting to me, partially because I usually still know someone graduating and because most everyone seems to have enjoyed their college time far more than I ever did.
It’s been three years since I graduated from Purdue. I was an average student who did just enough to get decent grades, but I never found my coursework interesting or engaging. I did all of my learning after hours writing, fiddling with Objective-C/Cocoa and building early Ruby applications using Rails. I suppose that’s the proper way to do it, though my family’s investment in my education can sometimes disagree.
A year before I was set to graduate, Steve Jobs walked on a stage for Stanford’s commencement and delivered a 15 minute speech that stuck with me during that last year of school and still to this day. If you haven’t watched it in a while, do yourself a favor and grab it from iTunesU.
One sentence alway stuck out more than any other in Jobs’s speech:
The only way to do great work is to love what you do.
Given my interest in (at the time) niche technologies like Rails and Cocoa/Objective-C, I knew I would never find a traditional job that was interesting and make me happy. Yes, I would be earning a steady paycheck, but was that worth trading my happiness for?
I decided to forego the traditional “seek employment” post-college route in favor of launching Second Gear. It was the both the most terrifying and most exciting decision I ever made.
Getting back to Jobs’s speech, the line most people took away from it was Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish which I also think defines Second Gear and the majority of other small development shops like myself. It’s about taking risks. It’s about not being afraid of failure.
In the three years since Second Gear was founded, it’s transitioned from a Web application provider and for-hire developer to almost exclusively selling custom software for the Mac and iPhone. There are still days where I worry how I will pay the bills next month, and I’m sure I have an ulcer from my constant state of worry, but I wouldn’t trade a minute of it for taking the safer alternative route. I am doing what others dream about: great work that I love. I hope you are doing the same.
