Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Yesterday would have been different

House: "...we die alone. Model Husband, father of the year, tomorrow will be the same for you.”

Patient: "But yesterday would have been different."

- A conversation on last night's House

I was looking through some old email to find a phone number I needed. In the course of my search I found an email thread with an old friend of mine, David Efergan.

David was my boss at Digital River (DR). I worked at DR for 2 years before starting Inkling.

Before starting that job, David was a friend of a friend who needed software developers in his Chicago office. It was an awesome change in my life to join DR. Mostly because it got me off the road. I traveled a great deal for work before that and I hated it.

(75% of the business travelers are miserable because of the travel. I think more people have to figure out how to abolish all these constant weekly trips for work. We aren't like George Clooney. I know there's a percentage of people that dig it, but it's a lot smaller than we want to admit.)

But the point of this is, David left DR a little after I left to run his own startup, Amadesa. In the email, David and I were planning on having lunch soon to catch up, and talk about these new adventures of ours.

David died 2.5 years ago at 42.

We never got that lunch. We just always had too much to do running our businesses.

There's really not that much to it than that. We're all on our deathbed. Entropy is ravaging the cells in our body this very second. Some of us have longer than others.

I think about how many people are excited about their new iPads and the never ceasing output of reviews. On top of that there's the never ceasing output of rage filled content about Apple's new policies. I'm not judging those or Apple. Just makes me think for a second.

If I was dying today, tomorrow or next week, would I be running to the Apple store to get this thing, or would I be on the phone talking and making plans to JUST BE in the same room with people that I cared about and who cared about me.

We all have our wants and our rewards. But temper that constantly with the thought that one day soon you too might have wanted to make yesterday different.

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