Live in the bookends #

Several years ago I took a break from the corporate world to work on a startup idea. In the beginning, I was intoxicated by the idea, molding and permutating and tinkering with it every which way. I ideated on its design, its architecture, its business model, its market opportunity. I incubated the idea from dawn until dusk, like a mother hen enveloping her infants under the warmth of her feathers. I coded up the application, built its landing page, and marketed it on social media. Each day whirled by, a tornado of excitement and activity.

Over the following months I continued to make rapid progress. What began as an initial prototype transformed into a robust, living application with now a handful of actual users. I hired a few part-time engineers to continue developing the application while I transitioned to business development. Although we were a small team of 4, we had daily standups, product meetings, and code reviews, just like real companies.

By the 6-month mark, I was fully immersed in sales and marketing. I created content, wrote copy, prospected new leads, drafted emails, and made cold calls. Unlike the world of software development, business development was foreign to me. I learned as I went, but I was not nearly as good at it. I did not see results. The uncertainty of the future increasingly weighed on the present. The days slowed down.

I trudged forward for several more months until I realized our condition was terminal. I explored other options - co-founders, advisors, external funding - but my lack of progress in business development chastened me. The energy and zeal with which I initially applied myself had nearly totally vanished. A once relentless, pulsating drive withered into a paralyzing lethargy. By the 10-month mark, I laid off all the developers and shut down the application. 

After the saga was complete, I was finally able to reflect on the experience. Of course I reflected on what worked and what didn’t: the idea, the product, the market, myself. But I also found it curious how my energy levels, and by extension the purpose with which I lived my life, oscillated so immensely during that period. 

What exactly had changed to cause such profound differences in my energy, my mood, my sense of purpose?

Materially speaking, my day-to-day existence was exactly the same at the end of those 10 months as at the beginning. I awoke in the same bedroom, worked from the same laptop, commuted to the same workspace. And yet me at the beginning and me at the end were two markedly different people. 

It must have been the case that it was all in my head. The story I told myself, which fueled my days both in the frenzied beginning and at despondent end, was all in my head.

The power of narrative #

Every story has a beginning, a middle and an end. So too do our lives, and it is likely for this reason that we resonate so deeply with the structure of narrative. Every work project, job, hobby, relationship is in some sense a story.

The beginning of a story is full of hope, promise, and opportunity. We have the opening curtain, the launch party, the project kickoff. Characters spring to life, brimming with optimism and ambition. We learn their history, their origins, their aspirations. The beginning tells us where they came from and where they’re going. 

Then comes the middle. The middle is where dreams meet reality. It is full of the nitty-gritty details, the operations and the execution, the challenges and the hardships. People grow up. Things happen. Time moves on.

Finally there is the end. We have the closing ceremony, the final presentation, the project recap. We reflect on all that has transpired and, like any good story, what the lesson is. We walk away with winnings and rewards, or if none, experienced gained.

Periods in our life which do not follow the structure of narrative often do not feel right. Without a proper beginning, we lack context about why we’re here or where we’re going. We meander aimlessly, periodically retracing our steps, wondering if there’s some greater purpose we may have missed. If we spend too long in the middle, we become trapped in an eternal present, afflicted with a myopia condemning each day to be just like the last. Without a proper end, we never achieve closure, finality, and thus the distance required to extract the “why” of it all.

It was after my experience with the startup that I began to appreciate the importance of personal narrative. As I looked at the various areas of my life, I began to wonder what part of the story I was in. 

If I was at the beginning, I considered what my opening ceremony would be. If the middle, I debated whether I was still on the same path I had set out on, or instead if I had wandered away, given up, moved on. If at the end, I reflected on how I would tie up loose ends, what my closing ceremony would be, and what lessons I would take away.

I learned that the structure of narrative was not something that existed “out there”; indeed, it was all in my head. I could invent new beginnings as I pleased. A new year, a new quarter, a new work project. Each would become its own chapter, a story within a story, an episode with its own beginning, middle and end.