Harvard? Oh yeah, that place…

I can’t believe it’s only been 10 months since the Harvard Business School rejected me. It seems like a lifetime ago. What’s interesting is how little I’ve thought about it since it happened.

It’s not that I’ve lost interest in going, but a lot of things have been changing in my life, and I’ve been so preoccupied that getting into HBS has taken a back seat for the time being. That rejection letter was a real wake up call for me. Not because I base my value as a person on getting into HBS, but I saw that rejection as a reflection of many of the things in my life that were truly out of order, and it was the catalyst to make me realize that I wasn’t living the life I wanted to live, whether or not the changes I would soon implement had anything to do with helping me get into the school later.

Even before receiving the rejection letter I already had a feeling I wasn’t going to make it. I knew my life wasn’t where it was supposed to be, that I needed to straighten up, and I had already started making some of the needed changes before the letter came. The letter merely confirmed what I already feared, and gave me some added impetus. Here are some of the things I’ve learned and changed during the past 10 months or so:

1. I was wrong. I’ve never had a problem admitting I was wrong unless I was right. Dang, that’s a good quote, and I just made it up, although I’m sure someone is going to tell me that somebody else already said it. But I swear, I’ve never heard it before. The point is I have been wrong about a great many things, and the problem was they weren’t the things I thought I was wrong about. Coming to see where I’ve been wrong has been eye-opening and educational, to say the least.

However, I would be misleading you, gentle reader, if I were to say I would have had things be any different. Doing things wrong is one of the greatest ways to find out what is right, and if I can use being wrong to my benefit, then in reality I was right all along, right? Right?!

2. Sloth and Selfishness. I have been seriously lazy. But “lazy” for me doesn’t look like what most people consider to be lazy. Laziness for me meant working 80 hours per week. But here’s the thing–I was working 80 hours per week so that I would always have a good excuse for not doing other things. If somebody needed help moving–sorry, too busy. Wedding reception? Too busy, got to work. Christmas? Got an emergency at work, I’m going to have to work over the holiday. Family reunion? Oh yeah, you can bet I’m too busy.

I used work as a means to engage in complete selfishness and do only those things I wanted to do. And not paying myself was part of the act. It gave my claims legitimacy. All I had to do was let people know I hadn’t paid myself for a few years and that I was really busy and people would say “Whoah, you really are working hard…” and then I could go my merry way, with no guilt and nobody saying I didn’t have the justification to skip out on whatever it is they wanted me to do. If I had been paying myself then I wouldn’t have had such a good excuse, and me starting to pay myself this year for the first time in four years was part of me realizing why I wasn’t paying myself, and that it was out of selfishness, ironically.

3. Pride. I’m really not all that proud, in fact, I’m probably the humblest guy I know. Definitely more humble than you, that’s for sure. But seriously, humility is the doorway to progress, right? You can’t learn anything if you think you already know everything. Not that I thought I knew everything, but the problem was that I thought I knew certain things, and it was those things that were holding me back. Actually, it was less about knowing things and more about wanting things, or wanting to appear a certain way. I wanted to look like a successful entrepreneur, and successful entrepreneurs have nice office space, right? So I had nice office space. Nevermind that it was costing me $5K per month and sat mostly empty. It made me feel like a big man, and that’s what mattered. Having a sign on the building wasn’t too shabby either for the ego. Of course I had all sorts of legitimate reasons–you have to have a nice office to impress clients and get the big jobs, having the sign on the building was great branding, etc. Baloney. Since moving out of the office I’ve only lost one or two jobs because of it, and I’m still landing big jobs with big companies. They could care less where I work from as long as the work gets done, and those are the kind of clients I want to work with as opposed to the kind that care about superficial and even foolish accoutrements such as expensive and unnecessary office space. Not to say that all office space is foolish and unnecessary, but it was in my case.

4. Physical fitness. I’m a firm believer that if you’re not giving 100% in one area of your life, chances are you’re not giving 100% in any area of your life, and when it came to physical fitness I was…well, probably around 5%. I mean, I did get a little exercise, mostly from raising a fork to my mouth and typing (did you know that typing burns 20 calories more per hour than sleeping? Awesome!). I’m about six feet tall and in 2006 had hit my peak of 236 lbs. Not morbidly obese, mind you, but on the official scale I actually was in the obese range. I returned to the gym in January for the first time in many years, and it was tough. I told my friend I’d pay for his membership if he got me there every morning and I think that’s the only reason I made it through the first few months. I quickly got down to 220 lbs. and have been as low as 210 lbs., although I’m at 215 lbs. as of this morning.

But I haven’t just been focusing on weight, I’ve been focusing on getting in shape and being healthy. My diet has changed, and I’ve exchanged a lot of my fat weight for muscle weight. I try to lift weights four times per week, and I’ve started doing triathlons. Yep, got a bike, running shoes, spandex–the works. You may have seen me changing a flat tire under the overpass by Thanksgiving Point yesterday morning, 10 miles out from home and with no cell phone on me to call home for a ride. Up until a few months ago I had never run more than a mile in my life, now I’m running 3+ miles and am working up to doing a full marathon.

Getting to the point where I can ride my bike up to Suncrest on top of Point of the Mountain is something that has given me more confidence in all areas of my life. Pushing ahead through pain and fatigue helps me to keep on going with other things even when they get hard to do. But sometimes pushing ahead doesn’t make sense if you don’t know where you’re going.

5. Learning to quit. One of the things I read in the 4-Hour Work Week (yes, I finished it, need to write a review still) that hit home was when Tim says that it’s foolish to keep doing something that’s not working. I’ve been trying to do certain things in my business that haven’t worked for seven years, and yet my attitude has always been “Just gotta keep going, keep trying new things, keep experimenting.” The problem is, I was changing little things, and it wasn’t the little things that were holding me back. It’s as though I were looking at my car and saying “Maybe it would run better if we painted it blue” while ignoring the fact that it’s missing the engine and wheels.

Just within the last month I took a look at the last seven years and asked myself “What has MWI done consistently well and what have we consistently had problems with?” It was immediately obvious that we have had lots of problems with web programming. That is, building content management systems, doing custom back-end development, ecommerce, etc. It’s not that we did a bad job at it all the time, although we did drop the ball on occasion, but even when a project went well, even when we made good money, it was almost always a pain. What we’ve always been good at is designing websites. With programming the satisfaction rate has probably been around 50-75%. With design it’s been around 95% if not better. But I had been fixated on how much money we made off of large programming projects, and it wasn’t until just this last month that I realized I could make twice the profit in half the time with a fourth of the work if I just did design instead of programming, and that was the end of it. I removed all traces of “web development” and “programming” from the MWI website and am in the process of either wrapping up or passing off all our programming projects.

Does it hurt to quit doing something you put so much into? Yeah, it does a little, because I really prided myself on the content management systems we built over the years. But frankly, I’d rather make more money and have happy clients than be miserable, have clients hate us, and not make as much money. That’s just the way I am. Well…now, at least.

So we’re talking about Harvard, right? So I’ve been thinking about how things have been improving with my life, the business, etc., and then I realize I haven’t thought about Harvard in months and I ask myself “So am I cooling on the whole HBS thing? Was I only interested in going in order to get out of the mess I was in?” And honestly, I don’t know the answer. I think I still want to go, but what I feel stronger than that is that I still have to get things in order before even considering the question. If I do go to HBS I want to go in having paid off all my business debt, having money in the bank to pay for school, having my family in order, being in good physical condition, and knowing what I want to do and how an MBA from HBS is going to get me there, and that means I have a bit of work to do. Maybe I’ll get all these things done and say “You know, I don’t want it anymore.” Or maybe I’ll get it all done and say “Ok, now I’m ready, and I’m really feelin’ it.” But there’s no rush, there’s no hurry, and I’ll let you know once I make the decision.