Distorting Reality
As I stood in pure bliss under the showerhead this Monday morning a sense of pride washed over me. Just a year ago, the house I was showering in had stood vacant. Worse, it was exposed to the elements for years and completely stripped of its vital systems1. But through countless hours of hard work and incredible support from friends, family & community members, we breathed life back into it.2 Monday was my first shower in the house where the hot water actually flowed through the walls, and what a shower it was.
We carved out our own little corner of the universe, and we changed it for the better. My hot shower was the perfect reminder of my ability to distort reality, and the timing couldn’t have been better because after a few months of working fulltime on Castle, the realities of startup life were starting to wear on me. Each day spent trying to build a startup is filled with an unparalleled amount of uncertainty, and the failures that inevitably result from all the experimentation will take their toll on morale in time. So much of your mental energy is consumed by the startup that it’s almost impossible to get it out of your head, and your personal brand is so intimately intertwined with the startup’s that you begin to self-identify with it.3 All of this may seem scary, but to me, it’s absolutely worth it.
The capacity to exert one’s will on reality and actually change it, that’s what gets me out of bed every day. It’s what drew me to web development, and it’s what lead me to start a company. Next, we’ve got our sights set on building Castle into the first scalable property management company. We know we’ll have to be relentlessly resourceful4 to have any hope of getting there, but we believe we’re just the right team for the job.
- Most abandoned homes in Detroit have been stripped of any and all precious metals—especially copper pipes and wires—by scrappers. ↩
- By “we”, I mean Max, Tim and myself along with Detroit blight-buster Sean Jackson. ↩
- Although I don’t know from personal experience, I imagine this experience being similar to parenthood. ↩
- Paul Graham’s definition of a good startup founder. ↩