Run Your Own Race
In the mid-1990s, whether you were an investor or entrepreneur, everyone in technology was flocking to internet startups. Companies like eBay, Amazon, and Yahoo were gearing up for monstrous initial public offerings. It was a frenzy.
Meanwhile, Tony Fadell went to work for Philips building consumer electronics and handheld computing devices. Everyone told him he was out of his mind. Philips was a dinosaur. The Internet was where all the innovation was happening and fortunes were being made. No one needed another handheld device. But while everyone else chased lucrative internet startups, Fadell continued building hardware.
Prior to Philips, Fadell spent five years working at General Magic—a failed company that lives on in the lore of Silicon Valley because of its alumni who went on to play pivotal roles at Adobe, Android, Apple, Google, and Nest, among others.
At General Magic, the team worked to create a mobile computing device for personal communications and entertainment. It was released as the Sony Magic Link and had a phone, touchscreen, email, apps, games, a way to buy plane tickets, and animated emojis. The problem was that the technology wasn’t reliable and it was built for an audience that didn’t yet exist.
The product was clunky—its processors weren’t fast enough, the touch screens weren’t great, and the battery life was too short. The team at General Magic built almost everything from scratch which was incredibly time consuming and expensive. And in 1995, the Internet was still in its infancy—email had yet to reach widespread adoption. The device became an exercise in innovation to impress other engineers at the company. The team failed to start with a problem that real people experienced and could relate to. They were ten years too early.
As the product floundered, Fadell created a plan to pivot away from making a communications and entertainment device for the general public, instead focusing exclusively on businesspeople. He pitched the idea to Philips since they were already a partner, making semiconductors and processing parts for General Magic.
Explore a different angle
Fadell held to his conviction that there was room for something amazing between desktop computers and cell phones. After pitching the mobile computing device for businesspeople on the go, he joined Philips full-time and got to work. It remained a niche market, but they successfully launched the Philips Velo in 1997 and the Philips Nino in 1998.
In 1999, after a successful run at Philips, Fadell left to start his own company. His vision at Fuse Systems was to build a better digital music player. People were starting to ship MP3 players but they were all clunky and difficult to use. And Fadell was tired of hauling around his collection of CDs everywhere he went.
Again, he was cautioned by peers that he was continuing to compound his own mistakes by remaining in consumer electronics while the next big wave in tech passed him by. In 1999, internet startups were reaching their pinnacle of hysteria. Fadell continued to stick with personal electronics because that’s what he loved and that’s what he wanted to learn—bridging hardware and software, atoms and electrons.
The dot-com bubble finally burst in 2000—markets crashed and venture capital funding dried up with it. Fadell pitched his company to 80 different VCs and was rejected by every single one. Risk off. No one was interested in investing—even if it wasn’t internet related.
The team at Fuse was barely hanging on when Fadell received a call from Apple in late 2000. Apple had recently purchased iTunes and the application was starting to take off. Steve Jobs wanted iTunes to work with MP3 players and realized Apple needed its own device.
Jobs asked Fadell to join Apple as a consultant on an initiative to create a digital music device, codenamed Project Dulcimer. Fadell agreed, hoping he could use that money to continue paying his team or parlay it into a buyout for Fuse.
As conversations developed, Fadell joined Apple full-time in January 2001 and brought over his team from Fuse. Jobs signed off on the concept for the device proposed by Fadell and his team in March. And the first iPod was shipped in November.
Fadell led the team that created the first 18 generations of the iPod and the first three generations of the soon-to-be iPhone.
While people thought he was a fool to stick with hardware and personal electronics for a decade across five companies, by the time Apple called him to make the iPod, he knew exactly how to do it. Every job he held had given him a different vantage point on the same problem. He built a more complete view of the challenge and knew with precision what to work backward from.
In retrospect, Fadell’s decision to stick with personal electronics seems obvious. But to hang in there for a decade while everyone around you is clamoring after the next big thing—internet startups—and constantly in your ear about missing out while they make nauseating amounts of money is no small feat. That takes serious discipline and trust in yourself.
Chase problems you care about solving, not trends
Fadell was never optimizing for money. His primary focus was aligning to problems he wanted to learn more about and a space he was passionate about driving forward. That meant building devices and working at the intersection of hardware and software. It’s what he loved doing and that was enough justification for him.
The most difficult challenge we face in life is to avoid getting pulled into races we aren’t willing to run. It’s why we end up chasing trends or grow insatiable in our quest for more. We’re perpetually consumed with a bigger title, a larger paycheck, the next milestone in life. We don’t want to miss out on anything. But this comes at the cost of sacrificing ourselves along the way.
Oftentimes we allow ourselves to be carried away by the herd because it gives us a convenient excuse to cling to throughout life. By not committing to our own personal direction, we tell ourselves what could have been. “If I wanted to, I could have written a book, built my own company, led this team.” But you didn’t. The fear of actually dedicating yourself to becoming, grinding it out, and putting your ass on the line left you cowering in fear. So you chased after everyone else.
To combat this, you must determine what is your own. You must slow down to clarify what you’re after, hone in on the problems you want to spend your time thinking about, and ignore everything else that gets in the way.
If you allow yourself to get caught up in the status quo—what everyone else around you is doing—it’s easy to end up in a dead-end career. You trap yourself into solving problems you don’t find meaning in and in doing so, diminish the impact you could have otherwise had.
You’re not going to make a dent in this world or create anything meaningful by jumping ship every two years and chasing the next big thing. If you’re deeply interested in a problem and care about solving it, you have to stick with it, regardless of who thinks it matters. Over a long enough time horizon things will work out in your favor.
Staying true to yourself will be the hardest, loneliest thing you will ever do. You’re going to be standing in the wilderness wondering what you’re doing while other people get rich and seem to have it all together. But authenticity is about playing the long game—what can you sustain indefinitely? What were you meant to bring to life? That’s where your best work is born from.
And while those same people who got rich overnight lose it just as fast and get written off as one-hit wonders, you will have slowly built an empire. Because you ran your own race.
Ready yourself to face distractions
You’re still going to receive calls that entice you—opportunities to make more money, follow your friends, work on something trendy. But these are distractions that will only pull you away from the work you find real meaning in. That’s why you must determine what you’re after and hold to that with all your might.
You must be able to navigate these distractions without losing yourself along the way. Do you have the willpower to stand up for yourself? Are you prepared to do the hard thing and turn down opportunities that don’t align with where you want to go? Do you have the endurance to stick with a problem you care about while everyone else jumps ship and tells you it’s a waste of time?
In 1973, Ed Catmull, the founder of Pixar Animation Studios, visited Disney to pitch a new computer rendering technology for animation. Disney laughed him off and instead tried to tempt him into a job designing theme parks with the Imagineering team. Holy shit, what a cool job. Since childhood, Catmull had been fascinated with Disney. But he turned it down without hesitation. He knew it was a diversion. He wanted to animate. And he trusted that.
Life will throw everything it can at you—attempting to distract or tempt you along the way. That’s the test you must face. When things get tough are you going to give up on the work you care about? When the easy money or the comfortable job comes knocking are you going to sell out on your own priorities? Or are you going to stand steadfast in what matters most to you—the work you are meant to do?
If authenticity is what you’re after, you have to find and stick with what you believe in. You have to trust yourself enough to run your own race. And if you do, it’s just a matter of time before you come out ahead.