24 May
History has its eyes on you
If you didn’t make it through my first post in this series, I don’t blame you. What was supposed to be a 300-word post turned into 2000. Long story short, I have an assignment to publish a blog a week for the next 14 weeks based on the readings in my Introduction to Entrepreneurship class at BYU-Idaho. Those assignments are being published on my blog.
When I first read the syllabus for this course, my first thought was that this process of defining my life was going to require a lot of work, and a lot of collaboration with my wife. How right I was!
We have been anxiously engaged for the last 5 weeks discussing the life that we want to build together. With so many options and decisions in front of us, it is incredibly overwhelming at times. Then I saw this video from Randy Komisar and shared it with my wife early in the week. Komisar talks about the propensity to become paralyzed by the amount of choices and passions that are possible. His guidance is to set a direction, as opposed to an ultimate destination. Once that direction is set, near term decisions that point you in the right direction can be much easier to make. The quote that stuck out the most was, “My career makes no sense at all in the windshield, it only makes sense in the rear-view mirror.” Chewing on that thought this week has driven most of the conversations I have had with my wife.
With that conversation as the foundation of this week, last night my wife and I were able to experience Hamilton, the incredible musical by Lin Manuel Miranda about the story of Alexander Hamilton and the early days of our nation. One of the most piercing concepts from this story is just how focussed Alexander Hamilton was on the mark that he wanted to make on the world from an incredibly young age. Much of his life was focussed on building his legacy. To Komisar’s point, Hamilton didn’t set out to create a national bank and financial system as a young man, but he did know that he wanted to be part of building a nation. From the Revolutionary War, to a legal career, to the Secretary of the Treasury, his career made much more sense in the rear-view than it did in 1776 looking forward.
I look forward to more reading, contemplation, and conversation next week.
