Dec 26
Merry Christmas, everybody.
It’s 2am on Christmas Eve as I write this, and despite needing to wake up in a few hours I stayed up later than planned so I could watch the movie August for the second time.
It’s not a movie that will suit everyone’s tastes, but I am a big fan for obvious reasons. In my mind the best movies are the ones that stay with you, that can inspire you towards becoming something better than you already are. For me they are films like Braveheart, A Beautiful Mind, Stay, Miracle or even something more silly like Rounders. August is one of those movies that lasts longer than the end credits.
Eighteen months ago, back in July oh-eight, I watched August for the first time and wrote a post in reaction. I quote my past-self:
I would like to create a small internet-based company of my own.
Check. What else?
I am not looking to merely find a niche in a well established universe.
eh… ummm… well… let’s just call this a partial success. Eighteen months later I have succeeded only slightly more than I realistically expected to back then, but with a second viewing of August I now wonder about the next eighteen months to come. Honestly, I confess my expectations this time around are at their heart just as hopeful, but on the surface much more grim. Our website has every chance to succeed, and I believe it could do exactly that, but the problem remains that there just isn’t any passion for what we are doing.
Personally I am excited by the idea of personal success. I desperately want to build something out of nothing, have it be good and useful, and have done it on my own. What exactly is that passionate ‘something’?
I don’t know yet.
In the wise and immortal words of Scary Movie 3:
George: I have a dream.
Tom: What is your dream?
George: To have a dream.
Meanwhile, with my own passions eluding me I have taken to latching onto other people’s dreams and adopting them as my own. So far that approach has been an epic fail.
Shortly after accepting my first part-time job at Netstudy I was all too eager to envelop myself in the enthusiasm and sense of limitless potential that seemed to surround us all back then. I somehow (quite easily, in truth) convinced myself that I actually gave a shit about insurance, and I told myself that the world would be such a better place if only insurance agents could earn their continuing education credits from the comforts of their own homes. That delusion lasted two full years.
I then went to Hubbard One, a much larger company in the heart of downtown where the people were all smart and cool. Still, even having an office in the same building as a Chipotle could not keep me from quickly realizing that Hubbard was in truth a code factory interested only in generating cash. The company itself cared for my existence only as a series of billable hours. And so, figuring that some passion – even if I didn’t share it – was better than no passion, I went back to work for Netstudy.
Now I work ostensibly for FantasyBlueBook, but oddly there is no passion to be found here either. I think it’s better that I keep the longer discussion largely private, but thinking about both where we’ve been and where we appear to be going it is enough to say that I have significant and growing doubts.
All this aside, for my part I want to resolve that eighteen months from today I can watch August yet again and reflect about the past year-and-a-half to come with a measure of pride. Hopefully FBB will have had another, even more successful year, but either way you can be sure that I will still be out there, continuing to search for my own passion. I would consider myself lucky far beyond what I deserve if I should actually find it.
Nobody Cares Yet.