Motivation

I got this text on Friday from someone I don’t know particularly well. I found it simultaneously presumptuous, myopic, and selfish. It bowled me over, I guess you could say. Reactively, I began drafting and rejecting replies in my mind. But as I ran through each, one after another, the only thing that felt useful (i.e. both kind and constructive) was a simple “no.”¹

A String of Money Losing Decisions

It made me realize, however, how much motivation has been on my mind. Not just over the last few weeks of the impending SpaceX IPO, nor since starting the new company, nor since selling my last, but all the way back to the end of high school and start of college. I graduated from Nikiski High, top of a class of 54 kids. While I went on to state college, many of my peers went into the oilfield. They got great jobs making more money than I could imagine — $60,000 to $80,000 a year. They all bought nice trucks, a few bought homes, and meanwhile I moved into a dormitory in Fairbanks, lived on a cafeteria meal plan, and took a bunch of math classes.

A few friends went to college around the same time I did. They also studied mechanical engineering. After college, they got jobs in the oilfield, too. They made $150,000 a year, went on nice vacations, and also bought homes. They bought very nice trucks. I, on the other hand, went to grad school where I lived on $1100 per month, took even more math classes, lived in a studio apartment, and biked to the lab.

After graduate school, though, I got a job at SpaceX. Other people from my lab went to Wall Street to be highly paid quants, but not me. I moved to California to help build launch pads. And that’s where everything changed, right? Yes, but not in the way one might guess.

After all that school, my starting salary was $72,000 a year — what my buddies were making straight out of high school — which translated to around $43,000 a year in take home pay. I did not buy a nice truck, but instead kept driving the same ‘97 Saab 900 I’d driven from Alaska to Ohio and then hauled out to California. I ate pretty low on the proverbial hog, and I worked a crazy amount.²

But then with many lessons learned from a first pad build and subsequent launch campaign, I quit, moved to Seattle and tried my hand at a hardware startup. That lasted all of eight weeks before SpaceX pulled me back to the barge for more adventures. I lived in a hotel for a year, then quit again, moved home to Alaska, and started a drone company. A couple years later, after burning through savings and not doing much else, I finally decided to accept all the space contracts that kept coming my way. That became the Launch Co. and, yeah, I sold that one and did alright.

And yes, the SpaceX stock did fine over the years as well. But believe me when I say that it was no guarantee. People have forgotten the early near misses, the hard times, and the knife-edge odds.³ The point is, it wasn’t the most obvious landing spot to make money in 2013. But it was cool. And I met some amazing people who I got to go on some amazing adventures with. That’s the point of all this.

Staying Motivated

If the goal were simply to make money, I would have done many other things. I was offered an amazing job out of grad school that paid very well, would have fast tracked me into management, and rotated me through cool locations all around the world! And I said no! To go make less than half the money — gross, not even net mind you! — for twice the effort. If money alone drove me, I might have even done what the guy who texted me back at the start of this post suggested post-IPO — shut down the startup, hose the investors who believe in us, and screw the team members who took a bet on the vision! Why not? I got mine, baby! See you fuckers in hell!

But the truth is that startups are a terrible way to make money. I feel like no one talks about this, or at least not enough. God, look at me I am one for three, and that’s considered pretty damn good. The pay sucks, the hours are terrible, everyone around the Thanksgiving dinner table thinks I’m a lunatic, and upside is not guaranteed. However, startups are amazing story machines, and that’s what I’m addicted to. Maybe it was the growing up as a bush pilot; maybe it’s just bad genes. But I plan to keep collecting great stories with great people as long as I’m alive.

The art lies in the evolution of the approach. I cannot tackle things in my very-very-late-30’s the same as I did in my 20’s. Those stories usually ended with me sleeping in a ditch, fighting a storm at sea, or doing something dangerous on a launch pad for no good reason. Those all sound great at the bar later, but you can only roll those dice so many times before they come up snake eyes.

I’ve learned that, no matter what motivates us, we create from three stages:

• The Wound, aka “I’ll prove you wrong even if it kills me.” This drove me clean through my 20’s in a blurry haze of adrenaline soaked decision making. At the end I found myself realizing everyone I was trying to prove wrong didn’t really matter, because they were all stand ins for my own unsurfaced doubt.

• The Gift, aka “I am finally feeling good, and I want to show the world.” We put it all together, maybe try a little therapy as a treat, and really start to cook. Unfortunately, we are still doing it for ourselves and (hopefully, not always) we learn that it’s a bit like living solely on simple carbs — delicious, mania-inducing, and unhealthy long term.

• Service, aka “damn, I’m sick of myself, what else is there?” We start to look for a true legacy beyond the end of our noses. Family, community, belonging all start to matter and we want to put time there. We look to see how our gifts can make things better for others working with a different set of gifts and circumstances.

It’s hard to find clean breaks, but I am hopeful that, at my best, I’m moving from Stage 2 to Stage 3. Certainly, I am not there every moment. Sometimes I’ll see some vaporware raise massive money and I’ll briefly regress to Stage 1, but it’s not about perfection, it’s about noticing then recovering.

It feels awesome to be back in the saddle with a great team, stacking wins, and doing things I couldn’t have imagined even a year ago. Once again out in the world, fresh off a sabbatical, my blood up, moving through each day with energy like I’m out on the open ocean again, a new breeze and the salt spray in my face as the sun breaks the eastern horizon.

Standing on the edge of the possible, joining with brilliant people that say, “what if?” as we all give this audacious thing our best try. Working together in service to our friends, family, communities, and all the while gathering a bunch of stories to bring home to share with them, to make us all better, to go out and try again. That makes me feel wealthier than a pharaoh, and for that reason, no, I will not be shutting down the startup and retiring.

Joy and adventure don’t always follow money, when we chase that. But if the fates align, and if we do it right, the money will follow our joy.

1. A question like this says a lot about the person asking it, and so it really has nothing to do with me.

2. I did the math during the launch campaign and it come out to right around $5/hour.

3. Even Wikipedia calls this a “minor technical issue” but was many hours of hard work from the Dragon team to recover functionality.