My last post was in May, about 3 months ago. It seems like a lifetime ago. I recently read this awesome quote by the great Paul Graham:

Do you actually want to start a startup? What it amounts to, economically, is compressing your working life into the smallest possible space. Instead of working at an ordinary rate for 40 years, you work like hell for four. And maybe end up with nothing. – Paul Graham

I have always felt like I have worked hard, but “working hard” is a relative concept. It also can mean different things in different contexts. How do I compare writing code at my desk for 12 hours straight to spending 6 hours digging out my neighbor’s septic tank when I was 13 years old?  The idea of a “compressed life” seems more appropriate that simply “working hard”. The difference between the two revolves around the fact that you could work extremely hard without actually learning anything new. When I was 23 working as a consultant for two major clients, I spent 3 months working 100 hours a week trying to complete development of a large invoice processing system for Ingram Micro and a new CRM web application for WFS Financial. Sure, I learned a little bit on the technical side and I certainly got better writing code, but those crazy times where more about production than learning. Contrast that with these past three months where it seems like every day there is a new and different challenge. At times it does feel like 40 years of challenges are being thrown at me all at once.

The interesting thing, though, is that while it is true that working at a startup you may end up with nothing from a financial perspective, you don’t actually end up with nothing.  Overcoming all those challenges in such a short time speeds up the learning process and you end up with 40 years of skills after only 4 years of work. It is sort of like a reverse mortgage. You are giving up a sane, normal life for a little while in order to get skills, knowledge and experience that you otherwise never would have been able to acquire within that same time frame.

This concept is perfectly described by Daniel Coyle in The Talent Code as “deep practice”. Basically the idea is that when you push yourself to the very edge of what you are capable of doing with any particular activity, your skills grow exponentially faster than if you spent the same time practicing at a more “normal” pace. So, living on the edge of your abilities and forcing yourself to step outside your comfort zone on a regular basis may not be that fun, but it will make you better faster.

One other thing I read recently that ties into this idea of a compressed life was a quote from Clayton Christensen that was published in the 37 Signals Blog.

Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question – you have to want to know – in order to open up the space for the answer to fit. – Clayton Christensen

This really hit home with me because I had always read a lot about being an entrepreneur before I started working at a startup. I thought at the time that I understood what people like Guy Kawasaki, Dharmesh Shah and Eric Ries were talking about. After living through the struggle of a startup and asking myself thousands of questions I have never thought too much about before, books like  The Art of the Start, OnStartups.com and Lean Startup are much more meaningful to me.

Conclusion

To summarize:

more challenges in shorter time = more problems to overcome = more questions = more “deep practice” to get all the right answers = compressed life = getting better faster at what you love to do

Addendum

I was going to end the post there (would have been my shortest post ever), but one other thing I feel I need to add. I don’t want to make it seem like living a compressed life is the best thing in the world. There is one small, insy winsy, little tiny downside to living a compressed life. It is really, really friggin hard. In fact, so hard that despite everything I just said I would not recommend this path for most people. Nothing in life is free and while you may be getting better faster at what you love to do, you are also giving up most of your life over that time period and adding a boatload of stress. I do love working at a startup, but even I think at times about giving it up and doing something easier.  The funny thing about this situation is that I tell myself that things will be more balanced / normal / uncompressed once MESH01 turns the corner and starts growing like crazy. While I do truly believe MESH01 will knock it out of the park, my idea about things becoming more sane once that happens is likely a byproduct of the compressed life delirium.