Do It For Free
It’s rather coincidental that I just received an email thread from some friends of mine, primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area. They were riled up over a commencement speech by Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, to the gradudating class at Stanford University. The whole premise of his speech is do what you love. About ten (10) years ago, I had a similar epiphany and since then, I have trusted my “gut” with every decision. I often reflect on some of my decisions and it’s further evidence to just keep trusting.
I grew up around business, and from a very early age was enstilled with a hard work ethic. I’ve been a taxpayer since I was twelve years old, and have already accumulated an impressive “nestegg” via those social security mailings you get every few years. If I retire right now at the ripe ol’ age of 28, I would actually be able to pay all my bills. 
Working alongside my grandfather, the founder of my family’s corporation, he made sure nothing came easy. The first half of my professional career was spent digging holes and carpentry by day (extending/maintaining our buildings), sweeping floors, washing trucks and cleaning bathrooms on the weekends. I acquired his traits in always needing a project, or solving a problem. I could never dream of obtaining the vast knowledge he possesses, yet he too acknowledges the same towards me with regards to technology.
I cannot remember when, but my first computer was a Tandy TRS-80, with a dot-matrix printer and a few cartridges: one game, logo programming and basic programming software. I lived in the basement of my parent’s home and when I wasn’t playing “army” or football, basketball or “cowboys” with the neighbor kids, I was teaching myself how to write programs. I built simple stuff in BASIC that played music, changed the color of the screen and even wrote a hangman program. I think it was then, about 10 years old, that I was “hooked”.
I had a knack for figuring out how things work, and a hunger to learn that will never been satisfied. I would buy remote control cars at Shopko for $40, about 2 weeks’ pay for me at the time, including my lawn mowing income. After a week of playing with the remote control car, I would sit downstairs and proceed to take it apart and turn it into something else, like a boat. I remember with my first RC Car, I attached the electronics to a letter-sized 1/4 inch piece of plywood. I disassembled the steering mechanism and built a rudder with the spoiler, then used popsicle sticks to build a proprellor I attached to the motor and fastened it to the back of the board with a couple hose clamps (from our repair shop). I proceeded to drive it up and down the irrigation ditch at the end of our street until my friends and I decided to blow it up with extra fireworks from July 4th holiday.
About this same time, I was enrolled in a program called EXCEL, which was advanced learning topics for gifted students. Each week, a handful of students from various local schools would meet at Jefferson for advanced studies. My main studies were math and sciences, and I learned about chemistry and biology topics that I had not again seen until my later years in high school. We did fun stuff too, like claymation. We made our own commercials using a high-speed camera and shaping clay. Kids in this program were offered an opportunity to attend The Gifted Institute, a summer program held at Carroll College in Helena, MT. My gracious aunt helped pay my tuition and we stayed in dorms an attended courses like we were in college, and ate at the college cafeteria. Mind you I was 12-13-14 for the years I attended, but I still remember noting how much better their cafeteria food was than ours in middle school.
We were given electives at Carroll, so I took a variety of courses from survival to TV101 - more commercials and documentaries, but my true love was the Computer Programming. By this time, Apples were prevalent in education institutions, so we were instructed using the Apple II and stored our programs on our true “floppy” discs - I still have mine, plus my TRS-80 and dot-matrix printer. My programs were more useful, like converting celsius to farenheight (9/5 + 32, right?). Given I had been teaching myself BASIC at home, I took to this course like a duck to water - pardon the cliche.
About now you’re wondering “where’s all this going?” I will get to that soon, I promise. Anyhow, I was about to enter high school and had been working on Apple’s at school, my TRS80 at home and my gracious aunt, an artist and treasurer for my family’s corporation, started letting me use her Macintosh computer. I would spend the weekends at her house and before high school (1990) surfing what would soon be the Internet. She was an early adopter of new technology, so every year she’d buy the next Mac, furnish her old one to the business and the business “hand-me-down” would come to me. I am proud to say that up until my PowerMac 7200/90, I have owned every Apple model built.
Using my aunt’s Prodigy service, then Compuserve, then AOL (when they began) I became fascinated with this “information” that you could find out there. Soon I began using AOL’s free space and their built-in web publisher to create my own web pages. Of course that wasn’t good enough, so I learned how to view the source code, changed stuff around, uploaded it and refreshed - magic! Within a week I was embedding content from other sites into mine, learning JavaScript and HTML and soon just writing/publishing my website from a text editor. I used to challenge myself and look at a document or magazine article, then try to reproduce it, formatting and all, from a text editor without ever viewing it in a browser. When I was done, I would gauge my success at how much my page resembled the source document.
This passion for web development, and the desire to “build things” was heightened with this instant gratification I received. Type a few lines and refresh the browser and voila, you just built something. No longer the weeks, months or yearlong projects my grandpa had me working on - I could build things right now and see the results! I continued to work for my family throughout high school, yet in my free time I pursued my passion of building things and publishing them online. I graduated early from high school (1994) and worked for a couple years before deciding to go to college (1997).
During those couple years, I had helped grow my family’s businesses and I remember a conversation with one of our employees from our towing company. This person was a college graduate from Great Falls, a licensed pilot and his family were successful entrepreneurs. I was baffled at why he would not pursue his studies and become a commercial airline pilot instead of driving a tow truck for us. Not knowing it at the time, but his reply has been my mantra for over 10 years since and falls right in line with Steve Jobs’ advice.
“My father has always told me to find something you would do for free and choose that as your career. I’ve always loved tow trucks.”
This person later left our company, became a commercial airline pilot and worked out of Seattle. He married into a wealthy family and seemed to have it all. As his worked demanded a lot of his time, and he was gone a lot, his loving wife began to “wander.” Ultimately, they divorced and he continued to fly for a while until he must’ve heeded his father’s words. He gave up his career as a commercial pilot, dug into his savings and bought 1/2 of a local towing company - one of my family’s competitors. Since then, I believe he now owns 100% of the company and equipment and leases the property from the previous owner. I admire this person.
About halfway through college, living with my girlfriend of 2 years and continuing to work on “the web” each night, I sent an email to a company called Big Sky Network Technologies. I just showed them my personal website, which I had coded by hand and incorporated a flash intro movie. I asked if they had any need for a part-time developer, figuring heck I do this for free why not make a couple bucks on the side - pay for my new 600Mhz Dell PC at least. An hour or so later, I received a response from the general manager, Mike McKay, requesting I come in for an interview. It was my first ever and I remember I had blue jeans on and a button-up light blue shirt. He offered me instead a full-time position and was willing to work around my college schedule. I am not sure if I accepted right then, but needless to say I notified my family and agreed to work weekends for them, and start my new career as a web developer.
My unique mix of business aptitude, extensive professional network and ability to learn and solve problems sealed my fate. After only 3 months I was the lead programmer and after 6 months I was offering my college friends jobs and mentoring them. We built up a successful software company from a 3-person subsidy of the ISP, and ultimately it was the only surviving division of future mergers and acquisitions. My post-college path led me to San Francisco and Silicon Valley, but ultimately I returned to Montana and now run my own companies. I now play poker and hang out with my former boss (the owner of the company) and Mike McKay and I are great friends, helping each other staff projects and hang out for lunch pretty regularly.
The bottom line is that everything I pursue falls in line with what I love to do, help people, solve problems and write software. There must be some value, minimally in the passion you put towards things you “love” versus things someone else loves. I too hope you can realize exactly what that is for you and am certain you will be successful in doing it.
Feel free to read my catching up article to learn about my professional career as of late. If you would like to read the article that got my buddies fired up, click here.
Happy travels!
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