I Used to Work on LeBron James’s Armpit
The poster
I used to work on LeBron James’s armpit.
Not literally. Well, kind of.
There is a building in Cleveland, Ohio called Tower City. Right in front of the basketball stadium, kind of facing it, somebody hung a massive poster on the outside of that building. It was half a building wide. It showed LeBron James with his arms spread wide, and it said “We believe.”
It was a Nike commercial. Most people saw it on TV.
What most people didn’t realize is that there were office windows behind that poster. My office window was one of them.
The poster had little holes in it, so we could see out. You couldn’t really see in unless it was nighttime.
And my window was right at LeBron’s armpit.
I bring it up because my time in that office is when a question found me that has shaped pretty much every big decision I have made since. It is a simple question. It is also an uncomfortable one, which is probably why it works.
If they were to write a book about your life, would anybody want to read it?
Hold onto that. I will come back to it.
The quote unquote American dream
On paper, things were going well. I had what I would call the quote unquote American dream. My first condo. A flat screen TV. A car. A good job with a good salary. If you had drawn a picture of what a young engineer was supposed to have, I was standing pretty close to it.
And I remember looking ahead and trying to see what came next. It was not hard to figure out. The next step was a bigger condo. Then a bigger TV. Then a bigger car.
That was it. That was the plan. Not my plan, really… just the plan. The one that comes pre-installed.
I remember thinking, “Like, really? Is that all that I have to look forward to?”
I want to be fair here. There is nothing wrong with a condo, a TV or a car. I liked all three. The problem was not the stuff. The problem was that the next 30 years looked like the same year on repeat, just with upgrades. A slightly bigger version of exactly what I already had.
Most people never stop to look at that path, because it does not ask you to choose it. You just keep showing up and it happens to you. Every year the condo gets a bit bigger and the question gets a bit quieter.
For me, the question got louder.
The 72 hours
Three things happened in a 72-hour period that changed my life.
The first one happened in a bar.
Somewhere in the middle of it I had a very clear thought.
“I don’t want to be in this bar 15 years from now getting drunk with the same people doing exactly the same thing.”
It was not a judgment on the people. It was not even a judgment on the bar. It was a picture of the future, and I did not like the picture. Same room. Same faces. Same conversation. Fifteen years older.
The second one involved a CEO.
The CEO walked in and gave a man a plaque and a watch. It was for 30 years of dedicated service.
I want to be careful how I say this, because 30 years of showing up for anything deserves respect. That man earned it. But I stood there watching, and the thought that went through my head was very simple.
“I don’t want that plaque and I don’t want that watch.”
That was the moment the bigger condo, the bigger TV and the bigger car stopped being an abstract idea. It was standing right there in front of me. Thirty years, a handshake, a plaque and a watch. That was the end of the road I was on.
The third one happened at the end of that same day. The watch day.
I went home and turned on the TV. A U.S. Navy commercial came on.
And it had this line in it.
“If they were to write a book about your life, would anybody want to read it?”
I was sitting in my condo, the one I had worked so hard for, and I remember thinking, no. I wouldn’t read the book of my own life.
Any one of those on its own, I probably would have shrugged off. You have a bad night at a bar. You watch an awkward ceremony. You see a commercial on TV. It happens. But three in 72 hours felt less like coincidence and more like somebody tapping me on the shoulder. Hard.
The book of your life
That is the question that stuck with me.
If they were to write a book about your life, would anybody want to read it?
I tried to answer it honestly. And the honest answer was no. I wouldn’t read my own book if I did this for the next 30 years.
Think about what that book would look like. Chapter one, he gets a good job. Chapter two, he buys a condo. Chapter three, he buys a bigger condo. Chapter twelve, he gets a plaque and a watch. The end.
Nobody is staying up late to finish that one.
What I like about this question is that it skips past all the usual noise. It is not asking how much you make. It is not asking what your title is. It is not asking what your friends or your parents think you should do. It is asking whether the story is any good.
And you know the answer almost immediately. You might not like it, but you know it.
I also like that it is a question you can keep asking. It is not a one-time thing. It works at 26 and it works later on too. I liked it enough that I eventually commissioned a piece of art with the question on it, and it hangs in my office today.
The jump
So at 26 I quit.
I left a well-paid job as a computer engineer and joined the Peace Corps in Mexico. For $150 a month.
Very weird for a computer engineer at 26.
I was working as a volunteer with indigenous communities, and I did that for two years.
I will not pretend it was a clean, heroic decision with music playing in the background. It was a jump. I went from a salary and a condo to $150 a month. On paper, that is a terrible trade. Any spreadsheet would tell you so.
But the spreadsheet was measuring the wrong thing. It was measuring the condo. It was not measuring the book.
And here is what I did not expect. The biggest thing I got out of those two years was not something I could have planned for. It was perspective.
There’s nothing that opens your horizons like actually seeing the rest of the world.
When you sit in the same office in the same city looking at the same armpit every day, your world is exactly as big as what you can see. The bigger condo looks like the only option because it is the only option you can see. Step outside of that, even for a while, and you realize how many other ways there are to live. How many other ways there are to work. How many other stories there are to be in.
What the question is not
I want to spend a minute on what this question does not mean, because it is easy to get wrong.
It is not about having an easy life.
An easy life is a boring book. Think about any book or movie you actually liked. Nobody wants to read about a guy who wakes up, everything goes fine, and he goes back to bed. You better be fighting monsters every single day… you get knocked down, you get back up.
That is the hero’s journey. You win, you lose, and then you win again, because you keep trying things and keep pushing yourself. The losses are not a problem with the story. The losses are the story. Without them, the wins do not mean much.
So if you ask yourself the question and the honest answer is “yes, people would read it, but it would be hard to live,” that is probably a good sign.
It is also not about being famous.
A book worth reading does not need a famous main character. Plenty of great stories are about people nobody has heard of. What makes them worth reading is what the person went through and what they did with it. Not how many people were watching.
And it is not about the result on its own.
If you win the lottery and win ten million dollars, it’s very different than building a business and getting ten million dollars at the end of it.
Same number. Completely different book.
One is a single page. The other is a few hundred pages of mistakes, small wins, bad weeks, good weeks and getting back up. Only one of those is worth reading, and only one of those changes the person it happens to.
That is the part I find most useful as a founder. The goal is not just to end up somewhere. The goal is for the path to be worth it too. The hard parts are not something you put up with to get the ending. They are what make it worth reading in the first place.
The next chapter
Here is where I have landed.
The default path will always offer you a bigger version of what you already have. Bigger condo. Bigger TV. Bigger car. Bigger title. It is very convincing, because each step only asks for a little more of the same.
So when you sit down to think about next year, I would not start with “what is the bigger version of this year?” I would start with the question that got me out of that office.
If they were to write a book about your life, would anybody want to read the next chapter?
If the answer is yes, great. Keep going. If the answer is no, that does not mean you need to quit your job and move to another country for $150 a month. That was my answer, not yours. But it probably means something needs to change.
And if the next chapter looks hard… good. That is usually the part people want to read.