I could feel the air whipping my face. I held on to Tyler's backpack as we zoomed up the mountain on his motorbike.
It was my last Sunday in Colombia before heading to Phuket, Thailand. Tyler thought it would be fun to have breakfast and do some work at his favorite Harry Potter themed cafe up the mountain.
We'd become good friends since we met in that gym elevator. We spent a lot of time working in cafes together, alongside his dogs. Occasionally we'd go salsa dancing with Willis, Tyler's thirty-something-year-old English roommate. Willis would twirl me around in circles as a live band played in the background, and I'd follow his lead.
I liked Tyler's little crew of misfits and adventurers — people who were working on all kinds of digital businesses, or just freelancing remotely as they traveled. I met many such people in Medellin. As we whizzed up the mountain on his motorbike, I remembered a passage I'd read years ago in Conversations With God.
The people who make a living doing what they love are the people who insist on doing so. They don't give up. They never give in. They dare life not to let them do what they love.
Neale Donald Walsch
Some other motorbikes zipped past us, and Tyler changed lanes. A beautiful view of the city emerged from behind the trees.
That passage, I thought. Why had it not worked for me?
I was frustrated with life, to be honest. A year earlier, all I could think about and talk about and focus on was my little online coding school. It brought me such joy! I would be working on it 24/7.
And it took off! It started doing well! But then that fucking ocean in my mind roared, and the wind changed direction, and suddenly I was obsessed with something completely different.
And it made me sad. It made me angry at myself. I thought this business was it! So much potential, and such a fantastic product. I'd had parents call me up in tears, telling me how much my creation had changed their child's life. Who doesn't want to hear that about their work? Who doesn't want to hear that something they took a risk on and created out of thin air, was making an impact in the world?
I was supposed to be of service to humanity, somehow. I was supposed to do something good with my life that helped people. Wasn't this it? I'd followed my curiosity, hadn't I? I'd spent hours upon hours upon hours building curriculum, and coding Minecraft modding libraries, and designing, and marketing, and doing customer service, and teaching, and training, and documenting, and doing all the different things.
But after spending that much time playing Minecraft with imaginative eight-year-olds, I began to notice parallels between the computer game and physical reality. I started viewing atoms as Minecraft blocks, self-organizing into higher and higher states of order. I began to notice deep, emergent patterns in my life.
And suddenly, I wasn't fascinated with kid's coding anymore. I tried to be. I tried so, so, hard to be. I should've been, but I wasn't. I became fixated on deeper questions.
It felt like I fell out of love with my business — another transient whirlpool in my mind that was destined to dissolve when the riptide pulled in a different direction.
Actually, let me rephrase that.
