I Find This Work Thrilling

I don’t just like it, I find this work thrilling.

“That sounds a little flippant, John. You just here to have a good time?”

I get it, maybe it sounds like I’m just here for kicks. But hear me out, this is the best you could hope for if you’re looking for a good product and reliable service. Someone who is genuinely excited by the job is going to outperform a team that’s just working for the weekends.

I have my challenging days, but I never get a case of “the Mondays”.

“What’s so thrilling about it?”

I have nearly total control over everything that goes on here.

That might sound like sound like a bad case of ego tripping, and fine, feel free to ascribe some of that to me. But this is really a matter of having complete agency over how things go in my company, including how I treat my customers and the reliability and functioning of the product.

It means I never have to:

• wait for someone else to fix something
• negotiate with others about an idea or direction
• coordinate with anyone else’s schedule or efforts
• rely on others to get a communication just right
• attend a meeting that I would rather not attend
• answer to investors or anyone else hungry for ROI

Perhaps best of all, I never have to take anyone’s word for it when it comes to what (supposedly) is or is not possible.

These things suck the joy out of creating for me.

I’d rather be able to act; I’d rather be able to fix it, to improve it, to build it, to make it awesome.

I’d rather hear feedback directly: both the joy that is praise, and the gift that is criticism.

In practice, this total control looks like:

• hearing a suggestion that I like and simply implementing it
• learning of a bug and simply fixing it
• having a problem and being able and empowered to deal with it
• generously issuing credits and refunds whenever I feel it’s the right thing to do
• evolving CA in a way that is true to the mission (making coaching better)

Ultimately, it amounts to making decisions and acting from a place of total contextual awareness, with no need to debate or compromise with anyone, and guided by the thrilling fact that I’m responsible to no one but myself and my customers.

“Sounds like you must be busy.”

You’d think, but I’ve been rigorously engineering the drab work out of running and servicing CA for the whole 10 years I’ve been doing it. Common support issues are routinely translated into tweaks or refinements to the platform itself, refinements that cut those issues off at the pass going forward. The net result is that our ratio of support issues to customers keeps decreasing, meaning doing support today takes about as much time as it did when the customer base was a mere tenth of what it is now (no exaggeration).

In spite of the business continuing to grow, it’s rather calm around here. And I find it thrilling.

“So is it all about control?”

No, I haven’t even gotten to the domain I play in! So I’m in tech, and that’s cool, right? But there are folks working in tech who aren’t working in an area nearly exciting as I get to work.

Like I know someone who used to work at Parkify, and that’s a company that’s out to make PAYING FOR PARKING SLIGHTLY MORE CONVENIENT.

Me? I get to work on and influcence coaching, or, in my book, the very expansion of human potential.

I get to help coaches who are doing life-changing work with tens of thousands of people, and help those tens of thousands to have a better, more difference making experience of that work. I get to help people who are committed to the betterment of others thrive more in their chosen line of work.

THAT, for me, is the real thrill. :)