Before The Window Closes

“Maybe in about 6 months or a year,” I said to my wife.

“No,” she said emphatically. “It’s now or never. We’re living at my parents, rent free. Tyler is three months old and we want to have another baby next year, which means I’ll want to work part time and we’ll probably be getting a house soon, which means more bills. You’ve got a nice runway now to make this happen, if you want to.”

“Yeah, but … ” I began to implore, before her look stopped me in my tracks. “Ok, ok,” I said, let me think about it.

The lady did have a point.

The issue under consideration was starting my own business. It was November 2010 and, at work, things just weren’t working out. I’ll take at least half the blame for this and we can chalk it up to a divorce on ground of irreconcilable differences. No harm, no foul and everybody move on. No problem. Except one thing — what to do now? I felt as if I’d had a great job and didn’t really want any of other comparable jobs in the industry. Largely, things had not worked out because I wasn’t willing to compromise (again, I’m not saying this in a good way), and going somewhere else would just mean having to compromise with someone else. No thanks.

I had a vision, I had done some research on operationalizing it, and I thought I had a decent shot because — especially for the reasons my wife put forth — I had a window of opportunity. I didn’t have to bring in that much money to keep the business going (I had a laptop, WordPress is open source, etc.) and I didn’t have to kick over a big payment to the boss lady every month. And trust me, this is the one payment I had better be able to make if I value my tranquility.

So the window was there, and my wife had helped me see it in all its crisp, stark and fleeting dimensions. Have you ever watched a sci-fi show in which the wormhole, transporter beam, or whatever, is only open for a few moments before it starts to flicker, and then disappear, leaving the folks you had beamed over to check out the local aliens stuck with them forever? This is an illustrative image of the window of opportunity I’m talking about. It was there, and with the aforementioned encouragement, I was able to take it before it disappeared.

Fast forward to late 2011 and I’m emailing with Kate. She had another job and had been doing some work for me on the side. Apparently her main gig was going bad, and I hadn’t expressed an offer to bring her on full time, not yet. I knew where she was, meaning she wasn’t going to disappear on me without a heads up, and so there was no impetus on my side to change the status quo. Then I got an email from her that changed everything:

“Hey, I’m not really that happy anymore at my job. Do you know anyone who might be hiring?”

I saw immediately saw the transporter beam, and knew my answer to this email would have a significant impact on both our lives. If I did as she asked, and suggested some folks to contact, there was a good chance I’d never get to work with Kate again. I mean, let’s say she got another job, it was entirely conceivable that she’s love it and be at it for the next 15 years, and that she’d be so enthralled, she’d have to stop doing work for me on the side. Bad, bad, bad.

Let’s say I’d wanted another 6 months or year before I was ready to hire her, just like I pleaded with my wife? Well, who’s to say she be interested in sticking with her unhappy position for that long, especially if I made no iron-clad offer that full time employment with me was in the offing?

So, I talked to some folks for advice, did some thinking and made the offer. Luckily she took it.

Fast forward to late 2012 and I was sending out another email to Nancy, just trying to stay in touch. I thought I was close to being ready for a salesperson, and Nancy was the only person I’d ever considered working with in that capacity, just as Kate was the only editor I’d wanted to work with. Before this specific outreach, I’d sent Nancy a few pings that had gone unanswered. She knew why I was getting in touch, and her lack of response meant she wasn’t interested or ready — or both. But this time, I got a response. This time my casual “How are you doing” lead to the conversation I’d been hoping for. There was a chance and, based in my experience, it had to be grasped NOW. The tractor beam may not have been flickering on and off as clearly as it had been in the other two cases, but I felt it nonetheless.

We moved quickly and got a deal done.

And here the three of us are almost exactly five years after the company’s inception — five years that have been defined as much by the three opportunities grasped above as by a million daily efforts. And that is the point. Great things can be done if you have a sense of time, of opportunity, of the fleeting nature they possess. Sometimes, it’s not time yet, sometimes it’s too late, and sometimes — just once in a great while — the time is now. Get tuned into this fleeting nature of things, of life, and you can do amazing things. Trust me, trust us.