Lauren rushes toward me the moment I arrive. She’s the production assistant for today’s broadcast, and she’s ready to get started. She grabs two wireless packs and secures them onto my suit. She tucks one into the left inside pocket of my jacket and attaches the other to the small of my back. While she fastens a microphone to my lapel, she sticks an earbud into my right ear so that I have a direct line to the producer. I am then ushered to a chair in the middle of the main news floor. Moments later, we are almost finished setting up. The film crew is tinkering with the camera and the studio lights. A makeup artist brushes powder over my face. Someone else adjusts my jacket for me. Then a voice booms through the earbud and asks, “Are you ready?” And suddenly my segment with Pimm Fox on Bloomberg Television’s “Taking Stock” is live in 3, 2, 1.

Pimm shoots his first question at me: “Why are you sending a 3D printer to the International Space Station?”

I’ve been asked this question plenty of times since we founded Made In Space years ago. Recently though, we have received a great deal of press for our work with NASA to launch the first 3D printer to the International Space Station later this summer.

My response to Pimm’s question is pretty much automatic at this point. While I zero in and answer, “We have astronauts up there on the Space Station for extended periods of time, and it’s a very big challenge to get things to them,” my mind is racing because there are a million other things I am also thinking about.

When you run a startup or two (I am currently deeply involved with several at the moment), it’s impossible to just turn everything else off. You learn to operate at a keen level of multitasking — not from any innate skill, but just out of sheer necessity. You’ve heard the statistics. You might have heard it said before that 90% of tech startups fail every year. I think it’s actually much more than that. So you focus. You multitask. You commit.

You do battle.

I continue my answer to Pimm: “You have to send things on rockets that are expensive, difficult to use, with very long lead times before you can get things there. And really, by putting a 3D printer on the Space Station, we’re going to be able to almost instantly put things in space.”

Meanwhile, during the the entire time of the interview, I’m rattling off lists in my head and brainstorming the next steps we need to take. For Made In Space, what additional engineering support do we need to move forward with the new 3D printing technologies we are developing? What are the next patents we need to file? We’re about to enter a crucial growth phase and will need to expand the Made In Space team. What are our key hiring criteria? And for my latest stealth startup, Plus Labs, what strategies do we need to implement to have the widest, most immediate impact on the industry? These considerations are happening concurrently, and they’re only a small fraction of what’s to come.

Make no mistake, it’s a challenge — operating on this crazy tier of multitasking mental gymnastics. It feels like constantly being stretched beyond your limits. But whenever people ask me, “Mike, why don’t you scale back a bit and do a little less?” I just can’t imagine doing any less. In fact, I would like to do more. Much more.

When you’re really passionate about something, you do whatever you can to make it work. I just happen to be passionate about a lot of things. But all of my startups have one theme in common: the goal of propelling humanity forward by leveraging cutting-edge technology.

Drawing upon a metaphor one of my engineer friends once thought of, I have come to call this type of effect a “forcing function.” Basically, a forcing function is a constraint that compels something (or in this case, someone) to behave or work in a particular way in order to achieve a certain result. When I have a plethora of things on my plate, such as balancing a live televised interview against formulating and executing logistical blueprints in response to my companies’ most pressing matters, the combined importance and immediacy of each simultaneous demand acts as one big forcing function. It forces me to grow into a better, stronger, more productive human being.

Because that’s the only way I’m going to achieve everything I’ve set out to achieve.

By the time the interview is over, I have three new business ideas I want to refine. I make sure to jot them down on my phone and ping my administrative team to remind me later.

My friend David Merriman greets me as I step away from the scene, and we walk down the halls of the Bloomberg West offices. He pats me once on the back and congratulates me on a job well done. David and I met on our first day at Oberlin College however many years ago. We’ve remained incredibly good friends ever since.

But David now is also one of my co-founders at Plus Labs. Without skipping a beat, David picks up right where we left off this morning before my interview with Pimm had started: “We need to reconsider Godlove’s solution. It’s the exact opposite of what I originally came up with. But the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced there’s something to what he is saying. Thoughts?”

And just like that, we’re back to troubleshooting, solving problems. Thinking. Building the future.

Not that for one second we ever really stopped.