“Energy and persistence conquer all things.”
— Benjamin Franklin
The Energy of Not Knowing
Think back to your early twenties and the experience of looking for a job. The questions were enormous. What is my future going to be? Will I be successful, fall in love, buy a house, have children? You had a lot of unknowns and a lot of big decisions ahead of you. Now that I am a little older, I want to remind you that at that age, you also had a lot of energy. Exciting and heady times for everyone.
A really big question looming in your life at that time was probably what your career is going to be. You sort of know what you like, and you have ambition, although how much is not always clear. So you go job hunting, talk to your friends, and try to find a place where the work is interesting and the people are good. I remember one of our earliest employees telling me she decided to join the company after seeing photos from our first Christmas party, we were giving away iPads at a whisky bar in DC. She thought to herself, that looks like a cool place to work. At that stage in life, most of us are looking for exactly that: somewhere cool where you can learn a lot.
Where It Started
Most people do not know this about me, but early in my life I was on staff at a Presbyterian church as a youth director. I did not have the job for a long time, but it had a lasting impact on me. I was responsible for the middle schoolers, sixth grade through ninth grade. It is a really tough age, full of changes and confusion about everything. I loved working with kids at that stage because it was not too late to keep them off bad paths. The moral compass can be unsteady at that age, and sometimes a young person just needs someone to talk to. Someone to keep them from getting in with the wrong crowd, doing drugs, committing crimes or worse. They are just trying to figure out how to grow up.
That is where I first learned how much I loved teaching and helping people. It is the most rewarding thing I have done in my career, more than all of the other successes and by some measure. Helping people grow and mature is my life’s calling. It is why I started my company. The idea was simple: if we could bring together a group of smart and happy people, we could make a hugely positive impact on the world. We would learn together, focus on something noble, and try to make millions of people a little bit happier every day.
The Privilege of the Long Road
It has been a long road. Building a company is not a straight line, and the lessons do not arrive on schedule. But the thing I am most proud of, looking back, is not the contracts we won or the technology we built. It is the people who came through our doors as junior consultants and left as leaders. That is the return on investment that no balance sheet captures.
Every experienced professional carries something that no training program can replicate: perspective. You know what it feels like to fail on a deadline, to recover a client relationship, to sit in a meeting where you were the least experienced person in the room and learn something that changed the way you work. That perspective is not just valuable. It is an obligation. If someone gave you a chance early in your career, the best way to honor that investment is to give someone else the same opportunity.
Let’s go be great.