A story of momentum, killed by selfishness

Creating your own business is hard work. It takes a large time commitment and some incredible determination. So much effort is required that many of us leave behind other commitments, such as employment, in order to pursue our endeavors.

There is something that many people don’t consider when leaving behind one commitment in order to focus more on another. Some don’t even realize that there is anything besides their own time that needs to be considered when pursuing a goal. Beyond the basic needs of life of course. But there is an important thing to consider when switching your focus, and that is momentum.

Being able to spend all of your time dedicated towards a singular goal does have its benefits, but without momentum your efforts may be for naught. If you make any efforts at all.

My first lesson in momentum came during my time as an undergrad.

During a summer between semesters of college I had a summer job shoveling sand in a sand mine. It was pure physical labor, in sticky places where machines couldn’t reach, and during one of the hottest summers on record. You can imagine the level of exhaustion one feels after a day of shoveling wet sand in 100 degree weather. I slept like a baby most nights.

Except the nights that I didn’t. Of course, I did not lose sleep because I was stressed, worried, or any other negative reason. I lost sleep because I was excited.

A few weeks into my summer job I found myself messaging an old friend. He had been playing with ActionScript in Adobe Flash in order to create a simple catching game. Different shapes would fall from the top of the screen and the player could scroll left and right in order to collect the shapes.

I was, and still am, interested in game design and at the time thought that such a game would be an easy project to tackle. Having enjoyed similar games on my smartphone I realized we could turn it into an app and maybe make some money while we were at it.

After a quick google search I found Unity3D, a free to use game engine which utilized C# for scripting. I had taught myself C# in high school, and was taking classes on the language in college as well. It was a match made in heaven and I was hooked.

When I would get home from work I would take a cold shower to cool down, then as quickly as possible I would jump onto my computer. Going through video tutorials all night was such a treat that I had to be careful of the time or risk having to shovel sand miserably tired.

After weeks of tutorials it came time to work on my game and I grew even more excited. Keeping a small notebook and pencil in my pocket I would jot down ideas, solutions to problems, and sketches of gameplay during every spare moment.

I even went so far as to create a kickstarter campaign for my project, in hopes that enough people would be interested in a $1 smartphone game. Summer was coming to a close and I was hoping to collect enough pre-orders to pay for licensing, photoshop, and a Mac for iOS development. All so I could continue development during the semester.

The campaign was bringing in donations from my family, my good friend was creating music for the game, and I was happily spending my free time developing it. All was well, until it wasn’t.

Summer ended, my job ended, and school continued. I was back in my little room in a large fraternity house full of parties and people who couldn’t care less about a phone app. I spent whatever time I had to in class, and had multitudes more free time outside of class then I did during the summer. And yet, all development stopped.

My momentum was fried.

An easy course load that semester meant there was little to no energy spent on school, so my days would start slow and end slower. Hindsight is 20/20 and whatnot, and there really are no excuses for not following your passions. But looking back now it is clear to see that, due to no ones fault but my own, my momentum had been decimated.

Maybe if I had chosen harder classes, took up a part time job, or joined a challenging design team I could have kept that momentum going and completed my game. But some how, at the time, I believed that the more time I had for myself the better off I would be. Somehow this didn’t translate into more effort being put into my own projects, even if I had started them solely for me.

Next time you find yourself at the crossroads of working for someone else and the ability to spend more time on your own projects, consider momentum. Some of the best businesses in the world were created by people with full time commitments elsewhere. We’re looking at you Google!