For years I didn’t tell anyone about my little sideprojects and startups

Jon Yau

Published in

blog.Stockphoto.com

4 min readDec 6, 2016

No ‘About Us’ pages.

Not a hint on my LinkedIn profile.

Writing freely on a public platform like Medium would be unthinkable.

I didn’t tell anyone — not that my family or friends would really understand anyway.

The stink with me was always the same. Tubs of talent. Pots of potential…but just couldn’t focus. Just didn’t have the ticker to stick it out. If anything, I was always looking for the easy way out.

Truth was, I hated failing (like anyone would).

I hated the accountability of failure.

I hated the closeouts attached to the flameouts.

I didn’t like explaining myself.

I didn’t like having to justify my decisions.

I detested living up to someone else’s expectations.

No matter how well-meaning, there was always a social (if not, professional) stigma attached to left-field ideas and their demise. There’s a well-trodden path to success, don’t you know? And it’s certainly not the one that you chose.

How did it fail?
What did you do wrong?
What would you do differently if you had your time again?

But if you hide from others long enough — you actually forget who you are. And more importantly, you forget who you were meant to be.

I had long forgotten to be the guy that I wanted to grow up to be.

I had stopped taking risks.

I had stopped creating amazing inventions.

No more Livingstone-esque expeditions into the unknown.

I had started playing it safe.

Studied hard. Got good grades. Got a good job. Got married. Had kids.

It took a mid-life crisis to understand that:

The only opinions of me I care about — are from the people I care about.
Telling your kids that they could be “anything they want to be” — is infinitely more useful if you were able to demonstrate it in some meaningful way.
At some point, you’re going to run out of time.

So get on with that personal masterpiece.

The form that it takes does not matter. Whether it’s climbing Everest, starting that YouTube channel, completing a triathlon or building a startup. It shouldn’t matter — not to anyone else except yourself.

Just make sure it’s a canvas that you’d be happy to sign your name on.

Guzzle as much of your own, home-brewed Kool Aid as you can. If you have to, fool yourself into swagger that you haven’t quite earned yet. Anything. Just get going AND KEEP GOING.

Don’t sweat the analytics. Don’t check the Fitbit. Don’t steal glances at the vanity metrics.