An Odd Road to Entrepreneurship
It’s hard to say when I first developed the habit of dropping things to follow my heart. Looking back, it’s easy to find some clear examples.
In 2010–11, I abandoned my job doing corporate strategy in the U.S. to become an English teacher in China.
I had always wanted to live in another country and learn another language, so I decided to just go for it.
The feeling of walking into a classroom to help students discover something new was invigorating. Unfortunately, the experience of living in another country was also isolating at times. I missed the sense of being surrounded by my family, friends, neighbors, and culture; that sense of living at home.
When I returned stateside, I sought out that balance between a career and a commitment to community involvement. I wanted to explore turning my passions into something meaningful in the world outside my workplace.
So, I used my experience in corporate strategy to become an independent consultant for nonprofits.
At the same time, I also fostered a love for yoga.
I followed that interest all the way to becoming a yoga instructor.
This has allowed me to share the joy of the practice with people where I live.
Learning yoga also helped me develop the patience and persistence to learn things that are unquestionably mind-numbing at first. While doing my consulting work, I discovered my next love, data science.
Gathering and analyzing data is the most scalable approach I’ve found to answer important questions about how we can improve peoples’ lives.
I had never meaningfully coded before, but an understanding of code became necessary for me to burrow into this rabbit hole.
So I began traveling down the long road to technical proficiency.
This pursuit allowed me to develop a perspective far broader than the one I had during my undergraduate studies in public policy.
I wanted to keep exploring, so I continued on to the Master’s of Information and Data Science program at UC Berkeley.
As I poured all that energy into my own skills and opportunities, there was a moment in 2016 when I realized that I needed to give back.
Living in Iowa, a place I consider to be among the most cordial and respectful places in the country, I could feel division and bitterness growing in our community.
I wanted to make lives better for people living here.
So, I started liking Facebook pages and searching for volunteer and advocacy opportunities. To my surprise, the process of discovering and taking action was extremely challenging and frustrating.
I turned that problem into my Master’s degree capstone project.
That capstone eventually became ActWorthy.
While gathering data on the things people can do to strengthen their community, I learned that relevant information is really hard to find.
It exists all around us, but remains submerged under the flood of information in our inboxes and social media feeds.
I began pursuing ActWorthy because I want to create an online space where taking action is natural, desirable, and fulfilling.
After a year of work, we officially launched ActWorthy.org on January 15, 2018.
My passion project has grown into a business. Nonetheless, after six months, building a startup is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
Since January, I’ve read countless retrospectives from other founders about how their grit, grind, or hustle produced lucrative businesses.
At this stage in the startup life cycle, it isn’t clear where all our company’s efforts will lead.
I’ve held off from publicly sharing my experiences as a founder because it didn’t seem like our story was as “noteworthy” as the ones other entrepreneurs usually share.
However, I recently received some encouragement to start writing about the messy aspects of creating ActWorthy.
The shiny benchmarks other entrepreneurs reveal might never arrive for us.
Nevertheless, the moves we make to reach our goals could still light the way for founders who find themselves in a similar position.
ActWorthy’s mission is to help people deepen their community ties through action. That mission extends to all our posts, including this one.
As entrepreneurs, we are our own community. We gather around each other’s successes, uncertainties, and failures.
Every founder who shares their story helps other entrepreneurs learn from their journey and avoid making the same mistakes.
By bringing my company’s story before you this year, I hope I can help clarify the muddy waters that founders wade through before their startup’s fate becomes known.
I’ll lay out the illusions I’ve struggled to see through, the tensions I’ve had to endure, and the pitfalls that have threatened to sink my own well-being and that of my company.
During a meditation retreat I took before completely committing to ActWorthy, I spoke to a meditation teacher about my fear of finding failure while pursuing this dream.
They said, “Jump, and the net will appear.”
I hope that by sharing a few of my trials and tribulations, you might feel less alone in your own entrepreneurial journey.
If you feel like you’re falling, perhaps the lessons I’ve learned while building ActWorthy might help you find your own net.
Even if we are pursuing drastically different passion projects, you can always reach out to me at ross@actworthy.org. I’d love to learn about your company and answer any questions you have about mine. Cheers.
