Holiday? What Holiday?
As a kid I recall reading a story about Thomas Edison being so wrapped up in his work that he would often times forget to eat. I remember thinking that it would be absolutely wonderful to someday find something that I care that passionately about that my focus on my passion would drive me to forget the basic essentials of life. When I started my first company (over 15 years ago), I quickly realized what that wonderfully passionate focus felt like.
And it’s still there with company #4, but not just with me – with everyone else on our team as well. Last Friday as we were working through a few issues, I had a thought that maybe we should have a day off given that it’s America’s birthday and all. I mentioned something about it to our development team and all I got were a bunch of stunned looks. You would have thought I had just suggested we swap our dev environment to .NET or something. After a brief pause, they each explained to me a few of the long list of things they planned to complete over the weekend and rollout on Monday and then we moved on and the conversation was forgotten.
This morning as we were all cranking away in the office, our wonderful (and apparently more considerate than me) HR person reminded me that today is an official (and documented on our Holiday Calendar) company holiday. That’s when it struck me how amazing our team is. Not because they’ll work themselves to the bone – that doesn’t help anything – but because they are so incredibly passionate about what it is we are doing that other details seem to suddenly matter less. That’s when you know you are onto something cool, and when you know you have the right team to execute on the plan.
And just so you don’t think that I’m some sort of a-hole, slave driver (I am, but I don’t want you to think that); I had payroll add a day of accrued vacation for everyone who “forgot” and showed up for work today. Now I’ve got to get back to testing…the dev guys have more stuff to rollout.