This is part one in a series about the lessons I learned while building Music League for eight years.
When I started the journey, it was 2016. I was 25 and lived in Alabama at the time, where mowing the lawn was a year-round job. On those hot summer weekends, I would wake up, get dressed in my lawn-mowing clothes, check my shoes for scorpions, slide my feet in, and hit play on a podcast that I was newly obsessed with, StartUp.
Podcasts were new to me. This concept of a startup was new to me. For those who haven't listened, the StartUp podcast is "a series about what it's really like to start a business". Alex Blumberg, an award-winning radio journalist, producer of This American Life, and co-founder of Planet Money, decides to start a podcast network of his own. The first season of StartUp – a podcast hosted by Blumberg – documents the process of starting his own podcast network, Gimlet Media, with his business partner, Matthew Lieberman. Pretty meta, right?
Suddenly, Alex finds himself pitching his startup idea to investors. He's getting real, honest, and sometimes painful feedback from those same investors, his wife, his parents, and his business partner. If he manages to impress the investors, he can be the next big thing. Over the rest of season one and half of season two of Startup, Alex goes on to raise $1.5 million to make his dream a reality. This is incredible! Alex is rich!
But he isn't. The money is for the business. Alex now needs to pour everything he has into the same business to keep those investors happy. The money is the A story. There's always a B story. The B story is what Alex spends most of his time working through, what he goes to bed worried about every night, and what he wakes up to in the morning. Alex's story could be a television show – in fact, it was (spoiler: it wasn't very good). We get wild stories with telling titles: How Not to Pitch a Billionaire, How to Divide an Imaginary Pie, We Made a Mistake, Burnout. Does it still sound incredible?
Looking back now, the A story sold me. It sells most people. The B story though – the cautionary, much less glamorous tale that plays out over the long run and should have you rethinking the A story – I ignored those. I should have paid attention to those, but instead they are lessons that took me eight years to learn on my own. I wanted to pitch billionaires on my startup idea! I wanted to be the name associated with the next Google. I wanted piles of money at the end of the (surely very short) rainbow.
It turns out that what I want is to have fun, constantly learn new things, and yes – make some money doing what I love.
Have fun.
This means that I'm waking up on most days excited to see what the day holds. I'm working with people who give me energy. If what I'm doing is instead sapping my energy, then I'm doing the wrong thing. If I'm repeatedly feeling less motivated and less energized after spending time with someone than when we started, I'm with the wrong people.
Learn.
It's a bit of a given that working in technology requires keeping up with the best ways of doing things. I don't chase hot new shiny objects. The truly important things show up so much that I can't ignore them. If I'm not learning new things, then it's time to start something else.
Make money.
This doesn't need to be life changing sums of money. This money doesn't have strings attached other than between me and the people who appreciate and use the things that I create. Some investor doesn't get to decide what my life and my business look like just because they have money. I partner with people who are putting in the work too. Who ever started a business so that they could work for other people?
The dull roar of the lawn mower is 99% of my weekend. It's the B story to my A story. When the podcast ends, I'm still going to be mowing. Best make sure I enjoy it.
– Nathan
When I started the journey, it was 2016. I was 25 and lived in Alabama at the time, where mowing the lawn was a year-round job. On those hot summer weekends, I would wake up, get dressed in my lawn-mowing clothes, check my shoes for scorpions, slide my feet in, and hit play on a podcast that I was newly obsessed with, StartUp.
Podcasts were new to me. This concept of a startup was new to me. For those who haven't listened, the StartUp podcast is "a series about what it's really like to start a business". Alex Blumberg, an award-winning radio journalist, producer of This American Life, and co-founder of Planet Money, decides to start a podcast network of his own. The first season of StartUp – a podcast hosted by Blumberg – documents the process of starting his own podcast network, Gimlet Media, with his business partner, Matthew Lieberman. Pretty meta, right?
Suddenly, Alex finds himself pitching his startup idea to investors. He's getting real, honest, and sometimes painful feedback from those same investors, his wife, his parents, and his business partner. If he manages to impress the investors, he can be the next big thing. Over the rest of season one and half of season two of Startup, Alex goes on to raise $1.5 million to make his dream a reality. This is incredible! Alex is rich!
But he isn't. The money is for the business. Alex now needs to pour everything he has into the same business to keep those investors happy. The money is the A story. There's always a B story. The B story is what Alex spends most of his time working through, what he goes to bed worried about every night, and what he wakes up to in the morning. Alex's story could be a television show – in fact, it was (spoiler: it wasn't very good). We get wild stories with telling titles: How Not to Pitch a Billionaire, How to Divide an Imaginary Pie, We Made a Mistake, Burnout. Does it still sound incredible?
Looking back now, the A story sold me. It sells most people. The B story though – the cautionary, much less glamorous tale that plays out over the long run and should have you rethinking the A story – I ignored those. I should have paid attention to those, but instead they are lessons that took me eight years to learn on my own. I wanted to pitch billionaires on my startup idea! I wanted to be the name associated with the next Google. I wanted piles of money at the end of the (surely very short) rainbow.
It turns out that what I want is to have fun, constantly learn new things, and yes – make some money doing what I love.
Have fun.
This means that I'm waking up on most days excited to see what the day holds. I'm working with people who give me energy. If what I'm doing is instead sapping my energy, then I'm doing the wrong thing. If I'm repeatedly feeling less motivated and less energized after spending time with someone than when we started, I'm with the wrong people.
Learn.
It's a bit of a given that working in technology requires keeping up with the best ways of doing things. I don't chase hot new shiny objects. The truly important things show up so much that I can't ignore them. If I'm not learning new things, then it's time to start something else.
Make money.
This doesn't need to be life changing sums of money. This money doesn't have strings attached other than between me and the people who appreciate and use the things that I create. Some investor doesn't get to decide what my life and my business look like just because they have money. I partner with people who are putting in the work too. Who ever started a business so that they could work for other people?
The dull roar of the lawn mower is 99% of my weekend. It's the B story to my A story. When the podcast ends, I'm still going to be mowing. Best make sure I enjoy it.
– Nathan