Having People Who Truly Believe in You

Being a young entrepreneur is definitely not the career path of choice that most parents have for their kids. I feel like the majority of people who care about us want us to follow the traditional path (school, job, masters degree, wife, house, kids, retirement, etc) because there is an inherit security that comes with that. So when we decide to sacrifice to follow a different path, I feel like that perplexes people and the most you can expect are for them to support you because they love you. For me personally this creates a bit of a riff between myself and those people because they don't “get me.”

Some people take it to the next level and root for you to succeed because it's a step they'd love to take but won't or can't – they like to live vicariously through you. These people love hearing about my “exciting” adventure and are really key in supporting me. The majority of the people I know fall into one of those two categories, and I'm fine with that.

But every once in a while I encounter a person who really gets it. They understand my passion for life and for doing something I love everyday. They energize me whenever I see them, and I'm attracted to them because we feed off each other. I see it in my partners with Pure Adapt, I see it in several other YE's I've met through Mind Petals or this blog, and I see it in Joe.

I also see it in our lawyer. He's a 32 year old “superstar” lawyer who believes in each and every one of us as much as we believe in ourselves. He believes in us because he shares in the passion. I can't even count how many times he's told us that we will definitely succeeded. Coming from someone as successful as himself, it means a lot to us.

He has that intangible “it” that we have. He's called me on a Friday night at 10:30 from his basement because he wanted to get something out to us as fast as possible. It could have waited until Monday, but he wanted to get it done as soon as he could. Most people think that's sad (poor guy is working on a Friday), but they don't understand that he's doing what he loves, what he's passionate about.

The majority of people separate their passions from their jobs, and consider the word “work” to be something that people don't want to do, but that's not the case. I don't think in terms of “work” - I pursue something I truly enjoy each and every day, and in turn it's what I want to do. I can honestly say that if I were a billionaire, my goals wouldn't change all that much. I might buy a nice house and a nice car, and I might devote more of my time towards philanthropic ventures, but I would still want to run Pure Adapt and achieve our goals. Somehow I think our lawyer would do the same. To me that's the ultimate test of true passion.

I can't overstate how important these people are to me – when friends and family just say “oh that's cool” when I do something, there's a small group of people that really understand why. We are a necessary rare breed and are very much outliers from normal thinking, so I feel like I need to gravitate towards each and every one of these people that come into my life. In the end, I suppose people flock to others that are like them – artists hang around with artists, athletes hang around with athletes - and I think this is no different for entrepreneurs.