20th
What drives you?
What keeps you going at mile 21 of a marathon? Or go for that one extra, “optional” hill repeat after having already finished five? When life deals you a bad hand, why do you do the right thing instead of taking the easy way out? What gets you out of bed in the morning?
Me? To create something from nothing.
I was originally supposed to be a doctor. In college, I started out as a bioengineering major, doing all the usual pre-med stuff — organic chemistry, preparing for the MCATs, etc. Some part through, being an engineering major and all, Berkeley not so gently reminded me that I needed to take a programming class. I’d always made fun of programmers — I mean, really, who spends 10 hours a day staring at a computer screen? (Oh, the irony.) I whined and complained, but, no, I still had to take the class.
Wow.
Not only was it easy for me, I was good at it and I loved it. Even more than that, something clicked: unlike almost anything else, with almost nothing except maybe a laptop, a couple friends and a whiteboard, I could build anything I could dream up. Unlike, say, designing a new car or a new airplane, I didn’t need to hire a thousand people, raise hundreds of millions of dollars or build huge hangar and assembly line — I didn’t need anything but a laptop and a brain. The rest is history. I’d changed my major by the end of the semester, started heavy-duty academic research within a year, consulting the year after and Amazon the year after that. That original spark still stands: from almost nothing, you can build anything you can dream up.
Whether it’s the wall at mile 21 or a bad day gone horrible, why keep going? What’s the point? Because, if you stop, you’re left with nothing. On the other hand, if you keep going, just keep going that little bit more, if you finish, if you do something meaningful, then — well, then you’ve made something meaningful and you’ve made it out of nothing.
Here’s to creating something meaningful.
What drives you? What keeps you going?
From Spokane Al.
