Some Words of Wisdom From Steve Jobs

When Steve Jobs passed away the other day I watched the commencement speech he gave in 2005. It was good and motivational like a commencement speech should be. One of his main points was:

...for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Live life like it's your last day on earth. Really? I love my job now, but on my last day in the world I certainly wouldn't go to work. Does that mean I should change something? How you would live the last day of your life is a bad metric to judge your life by. Maybe you could use how you would live the last couple of years of your life, but not just the last day.

I think Mr. Jobs is right though that we should live the live we want. Life is short. We don't have forever here. We should be doing something we enjoy and find worthwhile. Even that though is hard to judge. For years I didn't really enjoy what I did on a daily basis in Architecture. I was learning the field though and those years were instrumental to me being able to do the job I enjoy now. Should I have abandoned the field?

How about children? There has certainly been several days in a row where I didn't want to be a parent. Where I didn't want to go from five in the morning until eleven at night. Should I have bailed on my kids? My previous choices in life have informed the circumstances of my life. Sometimes life is doing what you have to do.

In both my examples there is a sweet spot. I'm in the sweet spot with my job, and pretty much so with Mackenzie. Years of work dealing with all the many stages between zero and five have given us a awesome little girl that if today was the last day of my life I would certainly want to hang out with her.

The Unforgettable First Year of Grayson's Life: Part 2

I was unemployed for almost seven months. The first few months I had a lot of close calls with employment, but nothing would stick. By May of 2011 I had conceded that I was going to be unemployed for a very long time. Then one random Monday when I was going about my stay at home daddy business I got a call from William Massingill with Polkinghorn Group Architects. They wanted me to come in for two weeks of contract work. If that went well they would most likely offer me a full time position.

I was excited and sad all at the same time. I loved being a stay at home dad, but Polkinghorn had the potential to be a dream job for me. I had long ago given up on the idea of finding that mythical job we were all deluded into believing we would have after college. Every single architect in the world is not going to design skyscrapers or fabulous houses for fabulously rich clients. I had come to terms with that fact fairly quickly after starting work. I still liked the profession though and I was kind of good at it. It was definitely better than working at Target or going back to college. So I stuck with it.

After a few years I had really come to like architecture and had found that I was good at producing construction documents. Being that this is most of what the actual day to day work in an architecture firm is I was pretty happy with my career choice. I wasn't completely satisfied though. That first firm was not doing much ground up work where I could point to something big and say I did that. I wanted to build stuff.

Since I wanted to move to Austin anyway I left my first firm and started work for O'Connell Robertson where I met Kay. ORA does ground up work and some cool stuff at that, but I was so far down the totem pole it didn't feel like I was really doing it. Then I fell in love with Kay and the dream died. Not in the oh agony your dreams are crushed kind of way, but the it doesn't really matter kind of way. I had found the love of my life and I could go after the really big dream I've always had. A wife and kids. After our honeymoon I took a new job with a friend's firm. Again there wasn't much ground up work, but I had a job that paid well. I generally enjoyed what I was doing and the people I was working with and for. I would have stayed there for the conceivable future if not for the great recession.

So Polkinghorn is not a dream job in the I love everything about it and everything is perfect kind of way, but it is the job I wanted when I left my first firm. I have been and will continue to be intimately involved in the process that builds a really cool addition to a really cool building. I'm building stuff. So within the first year of Grayson's life I went from a struggling firm to stay at home dad to working at my dream job. A year to remember for sure.