A Little Help from my Friends
The holidays always make me a little sappy, but this year I’ve got a lot of thankful to feel toward a whole lot of folks.
My wife and I had a baby, so there’s more than a Medium post there about feeling grateful and many other feelings. Setting aside the personal stuff for a moment though, my year with Showgo has me feeling a lot of warm things for a lot of different people.
First, because it happened most recently, I’m super grateful for, and indebted to, a group of students at Seattle’s Ada Developer’s Academy for helping us get our new website off the ground in the past few weeks.
My co-founder and lead developer had to drop off of the Showgo project right as we were about to launch our new site. We had wonderful design from the talented Jonathan Kurten, a solid build and deployment plan, and just as we were about to hit the big green “GO!” button, it all came to a grinding halt.
And you know what? I’m glad it did. Since then, in addition to the fabulous collaboration with the team from Ada, I’ve met and become close to people I wouldn’t have connected with otherwise.
People that have leant a helping hand when they haven’t had to. People who have share their time and resources with me. People who have stopped what they were doing to teach me what I could be doing differently. People who have been honest when it mattered most. People who care.
The two big lessons for me this year, then, are these:
- People are all there is.
And
2. Give yourself to others, and others will give themselves to you.
In other words, a naive founder like me can run around all he/she wants trying to out-think, out-plan, out-smart everyone but it all comes down to people. Not in the who you know in the slimy, name-drop sort of way, but in the way that you can’t do anything on your own. Or, even put better, nothing is worth doing alone.
Dean, Brian, Shannon, Jeff (not me), Drew, Elise, Kamila, Martin, Jonathan, Paty, another Jonathan, Shawn, Jesse, a different Bryan, Annette and Thomas are just a few. Some are people I’ve known for a long time, and others brand new friends. But they all have one thing in common — an extreme and unflinching generosity.
I’m grateful for all of my friends, this time of year and every other. Here’s to you and all of the people that help you get by. Happy holidays to all!
