It’s cold outside. Cold and wet. I am sitting in our “bedroom” on our airstream somewhere in northern california. My wife is sleeping next to me. Wes is sleeping 15 feet away in his pack and play. And Willow, our loyal Vizsla dog, is asleep at my feet. It’s peaceful. And I’m tearing up.
The hum of the furnace is slowly dulling me to sleep but before I get seduced by sleep I flip over to instagram. A picture loads, posted by a friend of mine, it’s a beer label, blue and green and artistic looking. I don’t pay too much attention to beer labels anymore but this one grabs me. I dig a little deeper into this beer label and discover that it’s the first beer sent into the world by one of my favorite ex-brewers from when I owned and then operated a brewery I started. His name is Alex E., he makes amazing beer, always has. But when he came onboard with my team my charter to him was to push us into new territory, use new ingredients, new hops, and never tell me how much anything costs. It just needs to be incredible in taste and look. The rest will take care of itself I told him. And this is what he did.
I begin to think through what he must be going through right now. All the jubilation of starting something. All the fear of starting something. And all the exhaustion of starting something. I’m drawn back to an earlier version of myself. A begin to reflect on all those emotions I felt 13 years ago when I delivered my first keg of beer to the Park Pub in Phinney Ridge. What it was like to sign, and personally guarantee, my first lease. What it was like to write the first paycheck to my employees, and then a year later my first paycheck to myself. All $500 of it – 18 months after I started.
I can barely keep it together at this point. Something is hitting me, and hitting me hard. I stare off blankly into the dark distance for a few minutes and try to stop the slow trickle of tears.
As humans walking, living, and breathing on this earth we want our time to matter, we want what we do to matter. We, at our core, want to matter. Entrepreneurs arguably more than others, but none the less, mattering matters.
I have worked with amazing people over the years. I have hired them and gotten to know them along the way. In the early days my only criteria to hire someone was that they were a good person and had a good work ethic. This informed all of my hires for the first 5 or so years, but at some point I needed skill sets that I didn’t have and my criteria shifted to – you must be a good person and you must know more than me. Like everyone who works with people there were a few duds that I had to let go along the way, but everyone who stuck with my team and I was amazing. I felt it to be my job as their boss to create a sandbox for them to play in, where they could discover some things about themselves and the bumpers of a “brewery” or a “cidery” would inform them and we would all bumble toward something over the years, growing ourselves and the company along the way. It wasn’t an uncommon question for me to ask my employees, “What do you dream of doing and how can we get you there?” Because, it turns out, none of us have arrived at our end goal, no matter our age or job description. When the companies I ran were smaller this was much easier to do, and as we grew, admittingly, it got more difficult. And it became impossible after I sold them, as this way of leading a company isn’t generally seen as the most profitable for the bottom line.
This is part of what is hitting me. I’m grieving the things I wanted to do with and for people, but never got the chance. For one reason or another the systems and structures that emerged in my last few years felt like a prison to me. Tied down by unrealistic expectations placed upon us by middle age men sitting in a room half a world away. Most of them unaware of the dreams they gave up years ago and projecting their disdain upon me and my team – all under the guise of profitability and profits.
I glance back down at my phone. Feels like I have been lost in my head for at least an hour, but it more likely was a few quick minutes. The beer can is still on the screen. The tears have stopped now and a smile emerges. Alex is living his dream. A dream he told me about the first day I met him. A dream that he has been chasing and committing himself to for nearly a decade. A dream, that amidst the chaos of running a company, I played a part in. Albeit small. This is what the tears were for. We all want to matter.