Two months ago, I went back to my old high school for the first time since graduation.
(I actually missed my high school graduation, but that's a story for another time.)
The reason I stepped back through those doors was a career event, where students could ask alumni about career strategy and connect with them.
They asked questions like:
- What's more important? Soft skills or hard skills?
- Should I start a business instead of going to college?
- Is it a good idea to get a computer science degree? Or is it doomed because of AI?
I think I heard some variation of that last question at least 42 times that night.
The event was great. I spoke with former teachers, reconnected with other alumni, and talked with tons of ambitious students trying to figure out their next move.
But the best thing I took away from that night had nothing to do with the event itself.
After saying bye to everyone, I went outside to head home for the night.
The air was cold. Much colder than I prepared for. All I had on was a short-sleeve polo with a thin quarter-zip over it.
I stepped underneath one of the high school parking lot's floodlights and exhaled slowly.
The vapor from my breath was impossible to miss as I basked in the soft, yellow glow of the street lamp.
"Cold, huh?"
I turned around to see who had spoken.
Walking up to me was a man dressed even more sparsely than I was. He was wearing nothing but a short-sleeve button-down and khakis. It was a friend I'd known for a while. He'd been running a business on the side of his 9-5 for the past few years, which I always respected.
"Is your upper body not freezing?" I asked him.
"Eh. It could be worse." He smiled.
Made sense. I had seen him walking his dog in shorts plenty of times in the middle of winter. The man was incapable of feeling cold as far as I was concerned.
"Heading home?" I asked.
"Yeah."
"Cool. Same."
Silence for a few seconds. Then he spoke up.
"Hey, I don't know if you heard, but I'm quitting my corporate job and going all-in on my business. I just put in my two weeks."
"WHAT?" I yelled. A few people walking to their cars looked our way.
"Oops," I said in a more hushed tone. "Hold on a second. You gotta tell me more."
"Yeah, of course. I'm trying to get home soon, though. You cool with talking while we walk to my car? I can drop you off wherever you're parked."
"Sure. I'm parked pretty far anyway."
And so we started walking to his car.
"So what's the reason for quitting? Why now?" I asked him.
"Funny you should ask. Remember that conversation we had last year about the 2x income framework? You brought up the idea."
I nodded. He was referring to a conversation we'd had about knowing when to quit your day job. TL;DR: don't quit until your business is bringing in more than 2x what your job pays.
"Well, the business is about to surpass that. In a couple of weeks, actually. That's why I put in my two weeks."
"Dude, that's awesome," I said as we got into his car.
"Thanks." He smiled. "Yeah, it was getting pretty unsustainable anyway. I was doing 60-hour weeks, sometimes more, holding down the day job and running the business at the same time. When I saw we were going to hit that mark, I knew it was time."
I was still a bit stunned. The news had come out of nowhere. But I was happy for him. He knew I was building something on the side, too, so part of me wondered if he had been waiting for the right moment to tell me.
"So what does your strategy look like from here? Now that you have so much more time and energy to put into the business?" I pointed toward the far end of the parking lot. "My car's over there, by the way."
As he drove toward it, he talked through his plans for the next year. He wanted to get into franchising, open more locations, and hand operations off to people running the system he had built from the ground up.
I listened and kept nodding. It all sounded exciting.
Before I knew it, we had reached my car.
He put it in park. He looked off into the distance for a moment. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again.
I waited, expecting him to say something.
Silence for a few seconds. And then he looked at me, right in the eyes.
"We're gonna fuckin' win. There's no other way."
I went home that night and immediately wrote one line in my journal:
If there wasn't a fire blazing in my heart before that night, there sure as hell was now.
Eight words. Simple. Maybe even stupid-sounding. But unbelievably powerful.
Like a line straight out of a movie.
That's exactly how it felt, sitting in his car in that parking lot. Like I was in a movie. Like the moment had been written for me.
But it was very much real.
I knew I couldn't let those words just dissolve into the night. The only way to honor them is to keep taking shots. Over and over. Miss after miss. Fail after fail.
But eventually, one of those shots has to land. One of those shots has to be a winner. Right?
At least, that's what I believe.
There's no other way.