I would have loved to seen what Steve Jobs was thinking in the early days of Apple. I would love to have read his personal insights and thoughts while he was actually working at Atari. If you ask anyone successful how they ended up where they are, it’s at best a hazy recollection. It will never be the original source. People’s memories are fallible, they change over time, and their opinions and impressions change with them. How can we ask someone to account for how they felt fifteen years ago when they probably don’t even remember what they ate for breakfast last week? It’s why the best teachers are the ones who know what it was like to not know. It’s why children repeat the mistakes of their parents when they become parents. Once we succeed, we simply forget what it was like to learn.
As I start my own startup, I want to record the journey to the destination. I have no doubt that once I arrive, I’ll all but forget what my day to day worries were like. I probably won’t forget the big issues or monumental decisions I made, but this path is more than any single inflection point. I believe (at least for now) that it’s a series of small hiccups all the way up, and each tiny speed bump is an obstacle worth noting. Hopefully by tracking my thoughts, dilemmas, and decisions I can leave behind a truly firsthand account of how I built my way there. This will be a logbook of my journey.