Do not confuse what is right with what is hard. I did that recently. My mentor set me straight. I’d been moonlighting my tail off at a startup that did not value my contribution in the same way I did. It had been red flags from the beginning on the misalignment of values, “what you’re doing has been done before”, “the real value of the company is in the data modeling”, things that I’d heard before and knew they spelled trouble.

Despite the signs, I chose to ignore the spidey sense, seeking to overcome the mismatch in values by showing, not telling. To my surprise, my efforts partially paid off; however, my push forward revealed that there were other fundamental value misalignments on how to grow a startup. With a heavy heart and resolved mind, I decided to leave and forfeit the equity that was on the table, a tough choice that I feel was the right one. The simple choice would have been to continue on with the team and hope the impulse from my momentum would materialize into alignment of values across the board.

Upon reflection, I found my truth of not wanting to lose the sight of the part of me that was awakened by this relationship. Income dependency removed, I was unleashed and unabashedly focused on execution, something that I had not been in years (scrappy startup days in college). The energetic might and discipline that I wielded while working on this venture made me envious that I had not leveraged these skills before to accelerate my own ideas, yet each day of progress on this engagement excited me by what I was capable of.

It was an unexpectedly revealing relationship in which found myself addicted to the feeling of having an influential purpose and impact on the direction of an organization, but feeling a growing resentment towards myself for not finding the spark to deploy such newfound resolve to my own pursuits.

Thus began my pursuit of purpose as I formed a design thinking group and started interviewing individuals about their lives, seeking to serve others by listening and achieving a baseline understanding of their problems. From my perspective, a rational design process is one that consists of listening first (data collection), then seeking to serve the discovered needs (feedback), before beginning to conceive of a product to satisfy any need (productization). I cannot get behind shotgun product design whose intent is to half-heartedly bolt together a complex enough product that can impress investors sufficiently to raise capital – a solution unvetted by the problem holders will create more problems than it will solve.