The morning of May 1, 1852 likely would have dawned cool in Petilla de Aragón, Navarre, Spain, where Santiago Ramón y Cajal was born. Santi was both precocious and rebellious. In 1963, he was imprisoned for destroying his neighbor’s yard gate with his homemade cannon.
Santi was a talented painter, gymnast, and artist, but his father, hoping to instill some discipline, apprenticed him as a shoemaker and barber. What his father wanted for him, more than anything, was that Santi would go into medicine, which he eventually did.
In fact, Santi grew up to be what many consider to be the father of neuroscience. He used his incredible artistic skills to map neurons, revolutionizing our understanding of the brain. His dreams of being an artist didn’t die, in spite of his father’s attempts. Instead, they found an outlet; a different way to last.
In a different scientific discipline, and not too many years earlier, Augustin Fresnel worked to prove that light behaved as a wave. Physicists of his time dismissed his ideas, hanging onto the concept that light must travel as some kind of particle (wave and particle, as it turns out). Fresnel didn’t give up. He refined his theories and eventually created the Fresnel lens, an invention that modernized lighthouses and saved countless sailors. That wave theory became the foundation of modern optics.
The Winding Path to Success
Cajal and Fresnel’s childhood interests played into their later discoveries and inventions. They continued to nurture things they were passionate about, even when life (or others) tried to steer them elsewhere.
Their persistence invites us to ask ourselves the questions: What dreams or ideas have we abandoned too soon? How often do we assume that a closed door isn’t an indicator that another path is waiting?
Like Cajal and Fresnel, we often have persistent ideas that won’t die. When I started my first company 16 years ago, I quickly gave up on it because finding clients was “too hard” and someone offered me a job that satisfied some of my very nerdy cravings to work in distribution and build software applications to help manage inventory and pricing.
I’ve continued to work for others for the last 15 years, but the idea for starting my own software development company has never died. Ask any of my family members, and they’ll tell you I’ve been talking about it for so long they had stopped believing it would ever happen.
During those 15 years, I’ve continued nurturing relationships and building skills that “all of a sudden” lent themselves to the development of my company and working with two of the best friends anyone could ask for.
You can reason that if I’d just stuck with things 16 years ago, I’d have had my first multi-million dollar exit from a software company.
The arrow of time makes that impossible to know for certain. I don’t think I was ready back then. I think I needed all the experiences and relationships that I’ve built in the last 15 years to get me to where I am today.
There were times (as recent as last week) when I’ve assumed that my story has ended because of the challenges of starting two companies when my children are getting to the age that they’re getting married, going to college, and having their own busy lives.
In Take the Long Way Home by Supertramp, there’s a refrain that says:
Does it feel that your life’s become a catastrophe?
Oh, it has to be, for you to grow, boy.
When you look through the years and see what you could have been.
Oh, what you might have been.
How often do we all assume that our stories are over rather than just taking a different route? Maybe that route looks like “the long way,” like a fifteen year detour before I created my software company.
If I chose, I could tell the story that my “life’s become a [work] catastrophe” of missed opportunity, or I can look at it the road I had to travel in order to get where I am today.
I held onto the dream without a clear vision of how it would play out in my life. That’s how it is for a lot of people in business and otherwise. There’s a winding road of experience and education that ultimately leads to where you want to be.
If you take a step back to examine your own life, do you see the same pattern? Do you have ideas of what you want to do or who you want to become that linger in the back of your mind?
I’m 46 years old which isn’t really old but I’m not in my twenties or thirties anymore. It’s easy for me to get caught in the trap of feeling like I’ve missed my shot, like the opportunity passed me by years ago and there’s no point in revisiting it now. I realized, however, that my old passions weren’t wasted. Just like Cajal and Fresnel (though on perhaps a smaller scale), I’ve been able to refine and repurpose my dreams to fit where I am today. If you’ll pardon the cliché statement, it’s almost as though the idea’s just been germinating for a long time, just waiting to take root.
I spent 15 years often thinking my only opportunity to build a software company had slipped through my fingers, only to realize that all those past experiences were just shaping me into someone far more capable of making it work. What if the same is true for you? What if the dreams you quietly set aside aren’t dead. What if they’re just waiting for you to grow into them?
We sometimes give into thinking that our ambitions are all-or-nothing. They’ll either happen when we first set out or they won’t happen at all. Life rarely works that way. Somehow, those things that are important to us have a tendency to stick with us, even when they take longer than we expected.
So here’s a question: What ideas have been loitering in the back of your mind like that cute person across the hall you’ve been meaning to talk to for years? What skills or ambitions have you dismissed as “not meant to be,” when maybe they were just waiting for their moment to shine with you?
