Move Fast and Break Things
From breaking bones to breaking code, how I learned to be an entrepreneur.
When I see something tall I want to climb it and when I get to the top I want to jump. I like excitement. I like a challenge. And I love a good story.
That mindset can lead to adventure, planned and unplanned. Like, for example, the time a few broken bones changed the course of my life. The day I realized my career would be anything but predictable. The moment I embarked on the path of entrepreneurship without even knowing it.
The Accident: An Unexpected Event
I graduated from college in May of 2009. Just one pit stop at Lake Norman (a lake outside of Charlotte, North Carolina) with friends to commemorate the change before I headed down to Atlanta for job interviews. That was the plan. Everything was in order. Look out world. Let the celebration begin.
Soon after we arrived at the lake, I hopped on the back of a friend’s jet ski, donned a life jacket (life jackets save lives!!), and suggested (in admittedly typical form) that we see how fast it could go. Never again, I tell you. Never again. A few minutes into the ride we hit wake. I was thrown into the air, did a head dive back onto the jet ski, and bounced off the machine and into the water like a rubber ball.
I remember it well. Flying through the air in slow motion, completely out of control. Feeling a crack of searing pain, and instantly realizing that something was wrong, very wrong.
I remember screaming my friend’s name, seeing him jump off the jet ski and begin to swim toward me. I remember a boat full of our friends pulling up beside us. Luckily a few of them were first aide certified. They knew not to move someone who might have a spinal injury. They kept me steady in the water, asking repeatedly if I could feel my toes, while I bobbed like a buoy as boats motored past us. I laid there, staring up at the hot sun and shivering in the cold water for 45 minutes (no cell phone service) while we waited for one of our friends to ride back to shore, call 911, and bring back a rescue boat. Hello, real world. This is not what I expected.
When the rescue boat arrived they strapped me to a spinal board and drove me to a helicopter that was waiting by the dock. I was taken on my first helicopter ride (not as cool as it sounds), and rushed to the emergency room where they cut off my wet bathing suit, took a lot of x-rays, and injected my body with enough pain killers to make the rest of the story foggy. We learned that I had broken my hand, fractured my back, and received a massive concussion. I was lucky, they said. I could have been paralyzed. I could also have been killed. No need for surgery and no long term damage. Just a summer in bed.
The Recovery: Making the Best of It
Just a summer in bed. It might sound like a I got off easy, but for an impatient, action-oriented person, it felt like torture. How was this my life? This was not the plan. One week out of college, I was supposed to be taking over the world, but here I was with a broken hand, a fractured back, and a pile of cancelled job interviews. Obviously one jet ski ride was so not worth this. There are smart risks and there are stupid risks. Thank goodness for life jackets.
As I lay in bed, all forlorn, I kept reading about a company called Twitter, so I signed up. And then I signed up for every other social media website I could find. I started a blog, painstakingly typing with my one good hand, getting faster and faster as time went on. Social media became my sunshine. My way of connecting to the outside world from inside my lonely bedroom.
And interestingly enough, a marketing agency saw my blog. They liked my writing. They were interested in my creative use of social media, fascinated by the “one-handed blogger”. So I took the job and started a social media program for this agency. It was 2009 and companies were really just starting to use social media so I was paving new roads here. It was exciting.
A year later I got a call from a recruiter. SAS Institute was hiring and needed someone with my level of social media knowledge. They were building a product called SAS Social Media Analytics. They pulled me out of the marketing world and into a world of analytics. My coworkers were statisticians and computer scientists. My skills became more and more technical. I saw our product move from a buggy beta prototype to an international product. Our customers were Fortune 500 companies and government agencies. I became involved in sales, customer communication, project management, product management, linguistics, analytics, and QA Testing.
If I fell in love with social media in my bedroom, I fell in love with technology in my office at SAS. I no longer wanted to be just the consumer. I wanted to be the creator.
And that’s when I had the idea for Avelist. I worked two jobs for a while, raised a round of funding, sold my house, and made the jump to full-time entrepreneur.
Looking Back: Connecting the Dots
This is my favorite quote from Steve Jobs: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
Who knew that a jet ski accident could be a pivotal moment in my life and career? But it was. It seeded my interest in social media, which led me to my first job at a marketing agency, which equipped me for my second job at a technology company, which equipped me with the skills and connections I needed to start my own company.
The point? You never know where life is going to take you. You can only create new dots as you move forward and trust that they’ll all add up. You can choose to look at the low points as a prison, calling them mistakes or regrets, or you can view them as opportunity, a new path to walk down.
I do like to climb things, to take leaps, and to make choices that lead to new ground. But I also like to survive. That jet ski accident shifted the way I look at adventure. Frankly, it caused me to value things that I once took for granted. I think we call this maturing. I’m grateful for the fact that I can walk to meetings, that I can type this story with two hands on the key board, and that I can think strategically about my company. And because I value those things, I don’t take those physical risks anymore. I’ve moved on to a new kind of thrill, the adventure of entrepreneurship.
Jody Porowski is the Founder & CEO of Avelist, an online platform that crowdsources people’s knowledge and experience to save others time and give them guidance. Follow her on Twitter @jodyporowski and check out her blog jodyporowski.com.
