Passion > Pension

I take advice from my friends very seriously. I don’t always agree with it, but I definitely listen and take it to heart. One of the pieces of advice I live by came from my friend Edlyn. While frantically packing for New York (a practice that yields a strangely deterministic spew of random clothes and belongings across her living room floor), Edlyn told me that “success isn’t about what other people think about it. It’s not about any of [that] bullshit – it’s about passion. It can’t be about anything else.” Even though Edlyn is light years away and firmly entrenched in another world, she’s absolutely right about passion and success in business.

You just can’t cut it doing what you do in tech it for anything else other than passion – especially for money.

I know one solid example of how passion wins out over wanting to get a pension (note: pensions are super rare in tech, but it’s alliterative so I’m going to use it). To empirically prove how passion makes you more successful, I present the following case study: Fasil versus Akash.

Fasil was an Indian business major at San Jose State who graduated a few years ago and has an extremely entrepreneurial mindset. Cool and collected, Fasil seems to have tailor-made himself to be the next Ron Connoway. He flirted with future software engineers in our school’s computer science and computer engineering clubs, started and ran our school’s entreprenurial society, and thanks to hundreds of hours of networking can fluently and efficiently speak business with an edge that would make a 1960’s ad executive proud. He’s pushy, but not so pushy that you’re driven away. And while he’s personable and smart in his blazer and expertly-woven confidence, one should have no mistake that in Disney terms Fasil is less Aladdin and more Jafar.

Akash, while having a similar upbringing, is a wild 180 degree turn from Fasil. He’s a computer engineering student at San Jose State who has minors in nearly every subject (including ballroom dancing ), and looks and sounds like an Indian version of Jeff Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Akash would not be out of place as one of the drunk guys watching girls strip on Girls Gone Wild while holding a Jaegerbomb in his left hand (in proper respect to the  fraternity drinking etiquette)  and screaming wildly, his wavy surfer locks bobbing left and right as he would shake his head and blast obscenities out his mouth like George Carlin with a loudspeaker. Akash is just as good in his field as Fasil is in his, but his attitude often leaves you wondering how high he is at any given point in time.

So who’s more successful? Fasil the eminent business mogul, or Akash the vulgar and surfer engineer. Akash, hands down, is fascinatingly more successful. While Fasil’s enterprises have eked out a modest living for himself, Akash’s resume reads like the Fortune 1000 list of technology companies in Silicon Valley. If your computer has a Core 2 Duo in it, if you’ve used a Cisco telephony device, or if your company has a NetApp filer in it, you have touched something that Akash has contributed to. Despite tailor-making himself to be the best businessman he can be, Fasil’s success is less than Akash the panglossian and dionysian engineer’s by a veritable order of magnitude.

So – why? Why is it that Akash drops bombs in tech and all of Fasil’s efforts are seemingly in vain? It’s not the attitude: even if Fasil seems a bit disengenuous, Akash’s rambunctious behavior (such as the time where he literally ran on stage and stole something from Steve Wozniak – I can’t even make this shit up it’s so absurd) and penchant to literally jump onto his desk and sing Journey during the work day isn’t exactly “traditional.” After thinking long and hard about it, I wondered if it had to do with intentions and purpose. So I went to my memory and thought about a common question I asked both of them: why are you interested in high technology?

I asked Fasil this at a networking event two years ago, between drinks while professors from our school’s business college hob-nobbed and name-dropped behind us. He leaned in close to me, fearfully looking left and right for someone that might steal his business ideas. “It’s the money, man,” he said greedily like a dwarf who struck the mother lode. “You can make so much fuckin’ money in tech by designing cool things nobody’s ever thought of.” I remember looking back at him like he just told me he had syphilis (this was during my fuck the establishment, open-source for all hacker period in college). “So basically you just want to rob engineers like me of ideas,” I said rhetorically in a stinging glare.

Fasil laughed and put his arm around me like a used car salesman trying to get me to buy a ‘93 Dodge Caravan. “Look, business is about money. You design me the cool technology, I make you the money. Simple. It’s how it fucking works. Engineers like you just don’t understand how business is, and you need people like me to make it happen.” He turned to me in an abrupt about face and held my shoulders commandingly. “Trust me: this is how it works, kid.”

As a quick aside, this was one of the points where I decided to change my major and push hard into business. Fasil’s arrogant and wildly unethical regard for business was the tipping point for me in deciding to take the path that I’m taking in life. I hate guys like this who’re just out to make a quick dime off of ‘tech, and I wanted to prove that you  can be successful without selling your soul.  Anyway, back to the story.

When I asked Akash this, it was as the two of us were stumbling back from “Building 12″ – a bar across the street that’s frequented by NetApp and Juniper employees. Akash looked at me honestly and soberly, and told me a different story. “I do all this shit – the coding, the designing, the work – because I love it. I don’t do it for the money or the [girls] or the fame, I do it because I just decided that this is what I love.” He looked up wistfully into the sky for a moment, searching for his thoughts in the clouds. “Fuck, man. I just love this shit. I love how you can use microcode on a register. I love controlling electricity like fucking Zeus. I don’t give a fuck that they pay you a lot of money; I’m in it because I get to spend the rest of my life doing what I love.”

He accentuated the word love harshly, nearly beating his chest with passion to intone this point. “We’re so lucky. We get to spend the rest of our lives solving the hardest problems in physics and technology. And we get paid pretty well, we can party, and we can have social lives too if we decide not to sleep or something.” It was at that moment that I knew Akash was going to do something amazing with his life.

I could think of a hundred reasons why you need to be passionate in ‘tech. The subject matter changes every day. The competition is fierce, necessitating total dedication to your product and company and definitely more work than your typical 40-hour week would otherwise allow. But I think it’s less granular than that. I think that success in business is just like success in anything else: you get what you put into it, with a little bit of randomness mixed in for good pleasure. If you’re not in high tech because you love high tech, then you’re not working on success in your field so much as you’re trying to find new ways of making money.

And frankly, that’s just not good enough.