After 30 years in tech, I get asked when I’m going to retire. I bristle at this instinctively.
How many days would I sit on the beach?
Like one.
Can you even imagine? Day two, I’m sitting there in a beach chair thinking, “Okay, now what am I gonna do?”
Everyone needs an outlet, and men who are bored always get into trouble.
Jordan Peterson says men need a dragon to fight. A dragon is the hard thing standing between you and something worth having. It’s real, it’s in your way, and it might beat you. If you already know how it ends, it’s a to-do list.
If a man doesn’t have a real one, he’ll make one up. Hurry, the job, the fight with a stranger online. Having a well-manicured yard and a clean house is not a dragon. That’s busy work.
I’ve had a few real ones.
The Navy
The Navy was my first. I worked the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. It taught me the lesson I’ve carried for the last 25 years: We’re so much more capable than we assume we are. You only find that out by doing something hard.
It’s the same reason backpacking is fun. It’s fun BECAUSE it’s hard. Nobody wants to hear stories about room service. We want the adventures, the mistakes, and the struggles.
The podcast
In 2009, I launched Evadot, a site and podcast about space and the future of humanity. It ran for 11 years and more than 100 episodes. It took me all over the world to speak and teach, and onto plenty of other people’s shows. I wrote a lot of articles along the way, too.
My favorite part was finding amazing people and helping them tell their stories. That’s a true passion of mine, and it didn’t end when the podcast did.
The airplane
I’m very good at being a pilot. I just like building things more.
So in 2016, I started building an airplane, a Zenith 750, riveted together by hand in a hangar. A lot of it happened at 5 a.m., before work, when it was 38 degrees inside the hangar and the airplane still wasn’t going to build itself.
I naively thought I’d finish it in a year. I rolled into year four, and it still wasn’t done.
In 2020, somebody asked me on a live webcast how I stayed motivated on a project like that. I fumbled the answer on camera, so I wrote it up afterward. Near the end, I wrote this:
“Part of me will be sad when it’s over… I suppose when that happens, I’ll do what the trail hikers do. I’ll just go walk the next trail.”
The family
None of the hard stuff I’ve done comes close to the adventure of falling in love and raising a family.
That’s the biggest dragon I’ve ever fought, and the most worthy one. It’s hard, and some days it beats you. Somebody is counting on you every single day. It’s yours. And you get to see how it turned out every time one of your kids walks in the door.
Most of the time, it doesn’t feel like dragon slaying. Most of life is ordinary Tuesdays, and that’s where the greatest adventures are.
When our kids grew up, I mourned the end of the raising kids chapter. That’s both understandable and a little silly, since they’re both well into adulthood. But it’s true.
Parenting doesn’t stop when they launch into the world, though. It changes. You stop being the one who fixes things and start being the one they call.
Winning
Sometimes you beat the dragon.
The Navy ended. The podcast ran its course. The airplane got built. Even the kids grew up, and that one changed into something new.
Tech is the same way. The problems that used to get me out of bed early are solved. I’ve become very good at building things that just work for a long time. That’s what you’re supposed to want, and it’s a good place to be.
But a thing that just works isn’t a dragon. Maybe the problem isn’t tech. Maybe I just don’t have a dragon right now.
That’s when the beach starts to look tempting, and it’s the worst thing I could do. You have to do things worth telling stories about.
So it’s time to walk the next trail.
The next one
I’ve got a few candidates, and every one of them has a person on the other end.
One is recording my family’s stories while my parents are still here to tell them. If I wait, there’s no second try. It’s what I loved about the podcast, too, and these are my people.
Another is a project I’ve been quietly building that helps people who can’t see get around on their own. It runs on an iPhone and a pair of AirPods. It turns what the camera sees into sound, so you can hear where the door is, where the wall is, and whether someone just walked into the room. A sighted person never has to wonder if somebody’s there. A blind person wonders all the time. I can still get excited about tech like that, and I want more projects like it.
I’ve also got a heart for mentoring young people. I’m uniquely positioned to help 20- and 30-somethings find their way. I don’t know what that looks like yet. I’m old enough to have been in their shoes, but young enough that it hasn’t been so long that I’ve forgotten what it felt like.
And I’ve even toyed with volunteering as a patient advocate at the VA. The Navy was where this all started for me.
Maybe the problem was never tech. Every one of these is about people.
Who it’s for
“Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men.” (Colossians 3:23)
The people are who I’d be serving. He’s who I’d be doing it for. That takes the pressure off. I don’t have to find the one perfect purpose before I start. Whatever I end up fighting, who it’s for matters more than which dragon it is.
If you’ve beaten a few dragons of your own, don’t sit on the beach, and don’t make one up. Go walk the next trail.
I’d rather be back in a cold hangar at 5 a.m. than in that beach chair.