Josh Padnick’s Blog

When I first started Omedix, I was very ambitious and very clueless. I was willing to work hard to get what I wanted, but I didn’t know what I wanted or how to get it; I just thought that surely I had to work hard to get it.

Fast forward about 2 years and I was actually starting to feel kind of burned out. I was so sick of working and working and working…and I felt like I didn’t have all that much to show for it. It’s hard to describe but here’s the way it felt:

Imagine you’re sitting in some newfangled car and you want it to go fast. You’ve been told that in order to make the car go, you have to push on the gas pedal. You happen to notice about 10 different levers on your right and you don’t know what they do or why they’re even there. When you press on the gas the car barely moves. When you push harder it moves a little bit faster but it’s still pretty slow. Plus, pushing so hard on the gas is making you tired.

So then you decide to start adjusting the levers. You push one lever all the way down and notice that the windows go down and the car is now going in reverse. You push another lever all the way up and now the car keeps on turning in circles. You play around like this for, say, 2 years, until you get the exact configuration of levers so that the windows are just the way you want them, it’s easy to push on the gas, and your car is moving speedily along.

I suppose that’s a bizarre metaphor, but imagine when you’re still in the beginning phases of figuring out the car and you’re feeling very ambitious. That’s great and all, except that “try harder” is not the problem. The problem is that you weren’t pressing on the gas with the right lever settings in the first place.

One thing I’ve discovered about myself and about so many other entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs is that you don’t bother becoming an entrepreneur unless you’re ambitious in the first place. When you start your own company it’s the most exciting thing in the world and ambition is at full force. But you can very easily burn yourself out by just stomping on the gas without bothering to configure those levers the way they need to be configured.

I’ve seen different people handle that challenge differently. Some people never realize there are levers in the first place, they exhaust themselves pumping the gas, their car goes nowhere, they get frustrated and they quit. Other people spend so much time tweaking the levers without ever trying the gas that their car also goes nowhere and they too are tired.

The successful ones, it seems, press the gas a little to see what happens, and then try adjusting those levers. They ask questions of people who’ve driven this car before. They read up how others configured their levers. They try some lever configurations no one else has tried. In some cases they nearly crash the car, but then they stop, regroup, adjust the levers yet again, and then press the gas a little to see what happens.

When you finally get the configuration just right, “ambition” becomes a wonderful thing again. Suddenly the harder you pump that gas the faster your already-fast car starts going. Now you actually get REWARDED for your ambition!

Incidentally, when you finally get the levers configured well, your car looks sexy, and you’re moving fast, people watch it go and say “Wow, that guy’s got it made. Look how lucky he is.” Little do they know about the levers that had to be configured so exhaustively before it works the way it’s supposed to. Little do they know the levers rattle sometimes and have to be re-adjusted, or updated to match new road conditions.

Anyway, enough of my ridiculous metaphor. My point is that ambition is really just a willingness to expend a great deal of energy to achieve your goals. When you’re in a setting like high school or college or an established corporation where the levers have already been configured for you and you’re just given a gas pedal, you really can “win” by working harder. That’s how your car is set up.

But when you setup a company, your car goes nowhere until it’s configured and if you’re not careful your ambition can wind up exhausting you.

Ambition is a good thing; a great thing, actually. But I’m starting to learn that ambition is not infinite or inexhaustible.  We get tired.  We get burned out.  But what keeps you going is when you see your car moving.  You know that if you can just push yourself to pump the gas a little harder you’ll recover your energy while your car is coasting along.

I’ve now learned never to pump the gas too much until my levers are where I want them to be.