First of all, I'd probably be a musician if I was good enough. I have played guitar and written music since I was 11 years old. I still do, and there is a guitar by my desk as I type this, and in fact I am in the middle of working on a new melody line. But, I am not a singer, and I'm not a good enough guitarist either. (And no, a huge amount of practice is not enough to solve the problem in my case! There is, after all, such a thing as talent!)

But, while it might not seem immediately obvious, the technology business can be a wonderful way of satisfying the creative urge. And it has a number of aspects that fill other needs.

There's a simple drive to achieve, which no doubt has deep psychological roots. For instance, I've read that people who were shy as teenagers frequently turn out to be entrepreneurs as a way of retroactively overcoming the problems they had back then; this kind of motivation can reportedly provide enormous drive. Well, I was painfully shy in junior high, high school, and college. One summer, this was greatly exacerbated one summer by the fact that I had what seemed to be the world's worst case of acne before any other male my age seemed to be showing any signs of puberty at all. I was pretty miserable. So that seems consistent with those patterns.

Another reason for choosing this entrepreneurial path is a desire for success to be determined in a way that is purely objective. One example of why this would be important to some people involves a math class I took in college. The professor was standing at the board struggling to figure out how to prove a particular theorem. After a while he gave up, saying that it would take too long. I'm always interested in a competitive challenge, so I took it upon myself to very quickly find a very concise proof before he went on to the next topic. I was successful. I raised my hand, and he said I could give it a try, but with the proviso that it shouldn't take all day. I went to the board and proved it in around fifteen seconds. I pointed out that the logic also proved a related point of interest to the class. The result was not a "Great work!" from the professor, although people in the class who knew me were smiling broadly at me. Instead, he glared at me, and acknowledged the correctness of the proof in a tone that could only be characterized as barely contained resentment. I can only assume this was because he felt himself to have been "shown up." I tended to be quiet in that class from then on; speaking up just didn't seem to be worth it.

This, among many other experiences, have given me a strong desire to work in a sphere where the rewards for achievement should be objectively proportional to that achievement. The reward should not be up to other people somewhere in a hierarchy; it should be purely due to the quality of the work. Now, there are a lot of skills involved in getting one's just rewards in business and academic settings. The ability to avoid offending other people's egos is one of them; perhaps I could have been more sensitive to the psychological needs of the professor in the example above. Knowing what I know now, I would have tried soften the experience for that professor, and perhaps the outcome would have been different.

Nevertheless, wherever other people are the determiners of how success is going to be recognized, there will be some disconnect between the level of achievement and the reward, whether the problem is politics, professional jealousy, an inability to understand the achievement, or something else. There are certainly companies where the chances of getting appropriately rewarded for good work are much higher than in others. Such corporate cultures are hard to create, but some companies have succeeded. Seeking out such a company would have been a very reasonable approach to my personal wish to be appropriately rewarded. But for a number of reasons, I became more drawn to the entrepreneurial world.

In the entrepreneurial world, proportional reward for achievement tends to take the form of creating a more successful company than the next guy does. The success of the business is the scorecard. It takes concrete form in the valuation of the company. So this objective measure of competitive success is really quite a deep and powerful motivator, infinitely more powerful than the desire to acquire money just to spend it. It solves a problem that creatively-oriented, competitive people must solve one way or another if they really want to optimize their satisfaction in life. Musicians solve it by having an audience that loves their work; entrepreneurs solve it by creating a successful company.

(Note IMHO that if you cheat in order to "succeed" or to fill your pockets with cash, as some of the top brass at Enron apparently may have done, success no longer has the same meaning; then it's just a measure of whether you're an effective thief, which is a very different life goal. Some people do have that goal, but those are not the people I'm discussing here. I tend to agree with Socrates: "And of all that has been said, nothing remains unshaken but the saying, that to do injustice is more to be avoided than to suffer injustice, and that the reality and not the appearance of virtue is to be followed above all things". Other people, perhaps certain Enron executives, may agree with Callicles. Different strokes for different folks!)

So far I have stressed competition (and, I guess, the ethics of competition!). But that is far from the whole story, because the experience of entrepreneurial creation certainly isn't always competitive in the moment-by-moment of doing it.

The immediate drive, the drive that is in the consciousness of an entrepreneur/inventor such as myself from day to day, seems to be grounded in something like the following: I often think about how to do things that aren't done well with current technology. Coming up with solutions to problems with no clear pre-existing solution a real high. There are few things in life better than the moment of coming up with such a solution. In my case, these solutions are sometimes technology-based business models, and sometimes purely technical solutions to technical problems. (As someone who also occasionally writes music and lyrics, I can attest that the joy involved in these different spheres of creativity are much more similar than many people probably assume.)

Of these ideas, I have had a number that were quite unusual and controversial at the time I had them, but which in the long run were often proven to be correct... Now, there are two ways such correctness can be proven. In the case of creative people who aren't entrepreneurs and don't use other approaches to actualize their ideas, they are proven correct by other people who conceive of them independently (often, later), and who have the gumption and skills to actually make something happen.

That is no fun for the inventor who gets left in the dust. There is, I suppose, some satisfaction in saying "I told you my idea was right!" to people who were initial sceptics, once someone else has actualized the idea, but really not very much. Behind it is a kind of bitterness.

The much better way is to bring the idea into the real world. It's enormously gratifying to take an idea that few or no others have at the time, and actualize its value.

There are other aspects too, that have nothing to do with coming up with the core idea and that can be shared by everyone who comes to join the team. Bringing something new into the world is the key. Not just the invention, but the company that is building the invention. And, if it's an invention that can bring some good into the world -- which I believe the idea we're working on is -- there is a lot of reward in that. We are "making the world a better place." Finally, if success brings monetary rewards, there are ways to use that money to help others (including, it must be said, one's own kids), and very significant satisfaction can be derived from such activities.

All of these are different forms of creativity, in the most basic sense of the word: "creating something." Not necessarily the core idea itself, but every other aspect of building a business as well. Creating something is immensely pleasurable. Being creative is a big part of being alive.

It's harder than sitting around dreaming of ideas that are ultimately to be implemented independently by others. It's an ongoing push which, in times of particular focus, I sometimes feel justified in comparing to training for the Olympics. It has satisfactions, if success is reached, that I don't think are necessarily less than those arrived at by winning on Olympic medal. Like Olympic athletes, people on a successful entrepreneurial team have to stretch themselves on a number of levels. The opportunities to learn and grow and tap into hitherto unknown inner resources are numerous. They include, for instance, developing the honesty and self-awareness to know what you can't do well, so that you can bring other people onto the team who are skilled at those aspects of the business.

And there are very challenging team tasks such as building a corporate culture in which everyone can feel that performing well will lead to the pleasure and monetary rewards of acknowledged success, despite the inevitable obstacles to that goal in a corporation.

Again, taking on these challenges is not as easy as, say, working a job where everything is easy and clearly defined and then coming home and watching six hours of TV a day. But I hope I have made a strong case above for the advantages of taking them on anyway.

So, given the choice between a) sitting around dreaming about ideas which, if correct, others will eventually implement independently and b) doing what I'm doing, I choose to do what I'm doing.

I've had enough success due to past ideas of mine that I can personally seed-fund my current effort. This is, of course, a great source of satisfaction in itself. And due to my ability to seed fund the venture, I've had the privilege to bring a couple of fine people into the venture, and am greatly enjoying the process of working together to bring our collective ideas to fruition. (In fact, being able to choose who you work with is a major advantage to this path. In this case, I believe our complementary skills lead to the beginning of a well-rounded team.)

Hopefully, the above gives some insight, for any who may be interested, into why I am spending my career as I am.

		© Copyright 2006 Gary Robinson. Last update: 1/30/06; 2:47:56 PM.