Two fish

My dad forwarded a group of photos, some of which were fairly remarkable.  I took one of them as a symbol of what I’m trying to accomplish with regard to a career.

The picture is of an osprey just emerging from the water.  It’s legs are still stretched out downward and in each talon is a fish.  It’s a remarkable shot.  The only thing that I didn’t like about it was the blood you can make out from the fish in the right talon.  I used “Paint” to get rid of the blood and made the photo the background for my desktop at work.  A little while later I realized with a start that although I am the osprey the blood is mine.

The first fish is finishing this PhD with honor.  I’ve structured my life to give this fish the priority.  If things work out the way I hope they might then I’ll be very proud of this part of my life.

The second fish has an identity that is a bit fuzzier.  I’m working now on helping it to get the proper form.

In the summer of 2005 Gina and the kids went to Utah for a couple weeks.  I went to the library and I got a bunch of biographies.  I got a bit of whatever was on hand.  I got a biography of Edison, one of Tolstoy, one of Mother Teresa, and one of Sam Walton.  I read through the one on Edison.  It was interesting and a little disquieting.  I began those on Tolstoy and Mother Teresa and laid them down.  I started the one on Sam Walton, an autobiography, actually, called “Made in America,” and found myself unable to put it down.

The library closest to the physics building at UNM happens to the be Parish Library, which is the business library.  One day I had had enough of optics in the dark basement and I went to the Parish library to study.  While I was there I decided to look for more autobiographies like the Walton one.  I found quite a few interesting books and made the mistake of cracking open “Grinding it Out” by Ray Kroc.

I didn’t stop reading until I had finished the book.  My day was pounded.  But I had been blown away.  In those days I rode the bus to get to school and so I had time to read every day.  I went through biography after biography.  I learned from Dave Packard (boring book, but plenty to learn), from Bill Marriot (fascinating read), from Michael Dell (interesting intro, boring bit at the end but something to learn), from Bob Galvin (Fascinating), from the Tom Watsons (Great book), from Dave Thomas, and others.  I had read “Built to Last” and “Good to Great” awhile before and I took them to some extent as guides in what companies I chose to read about.

At this time I was really struggling to enjoy myself in the lab.  I had received assurances from my adviser that I would be done after 4 years, though, which meant only 1.5 more years and I was trying to decide whether to take a Masters degree and run or to stick it out.  That January my adviser adjusted 4 years to 5 or 6 with no real commitment.  I found out about a student who had been with him for 9 years and never did get the PhD.  At the same time I had been basing my thinking and planning on a piece of equipment that he had asked me to look into getting.  It had been 1.5 years and we never got the piece of equipment.  And my learning had stalled.  I bolted.

SongPiper was created soon after that.  I got to learn Java and at the same time I was learning quantum optics.  SongPiper progressed nicely and then I’m not sure what happened.  One theory is that I lost interest when I started working with Los Alamos.  Certainly the two events coincide.  Did financial security get rid of the spark that was driving me forward?

There were other things as well.  I started to realize that a business is also a job.  It also requires time.  Did I really want to give my attention to building up a product to help people learn to sight read?  Gradually I decided that the answer was no.

In November of 2006 I was told that my funding from LANL would be gone by February.  Lily was due in March.  All of the sudden I got very entrepreneurial.   I started making arrangements to broker internships for talented grad students with government and industry.  I became pretty excited about it.  Then funding came through and I let the whole thing float away.  I lost pretty much most of my interest.

In the meantime I was watching the companies founded by some of my heroes.  I was watching IBM, Motorola, Wal-Mart, HP, and so on.  It seemed pretty clear to me that these companies were no longer the companies they had been founded to be.  Even if they were, what guarantee was there that they would stay that way?  There are funny forces at work.  Wal-Mart is a remarkable company.  But they are huge.  Gigantic!  Do they really need to keep on growing?  The answer seems to be “Yes.”  It seems to be that good performance in the stock market is contingent on growth.  They are owned by that market and they have some duty to perform.

I read a new book that was pretty neat.  It was called “Success built to last.”  It’s a good book and I heartily recommend it.  It’s basically a compilation of stories about a whole bunch of amazing heroes and an analysis of what drives them and how they operate.  One of the people in the book was Yvon Chouinard and it mentioned that he wrote a book called “Let my People go Surfing.”  It’s one of my favorite books.

Basically, though, it answered my questions of how to stave off having your company lose its moorings.  It helped me answer my questions about how to make a company a good company in the sense of one that I would be proud to build.

I wrote a post describing the kind of company that I might want to build a couple days before Lily was born.  To make the founding of such a company a real goal I attached a date.  Now the date is only 1.5 months away and I’m not sure how to make it happen.

It’s not that I don’t know how to offer a service that’s worth paying for, although that may be something I need to think about.   The big question is how I’m going to do something that will fit into my life right now and that will also be something that is worth continuing over time.  What can I do that won’t interrupt me while I’m eating dinner or having Family Home Evening?  What can I do that won’t distract me from my work?  What can I do that will provide a real service?  What can I do that fits who I am?

I have some time.  We put the kids to bed at 7:00.  At 8:00 Gina lies down with Lily and I have from 8:00 to 9:00 to do whatever I want.  We aren’t 100% rigid on it so I end up with between 4 and 6 hours per week.  I know it’s not much time.  But it is some time and I know I can do a lot with some time that comes regularly and systematically.  At least if I have a clear goal.  What I want to do is come up with the right goal.

Sometimes when I walk I can feel two fat fish, one in each hand.  They are much juicier and much more plump than the fish in the osprey’s hand.  I’m praying for direction with regard to the second fish.  The first fish is closer than ever and is fattening up in a way that is truly thrilling.  We’ll see.