You Can't Break an Egg Without Making an Omelette
So when you're a kid, adults love asking what you want to be when you grow up. Firefighter. Astronaut. Veterinarian. You throw something out, they smile, everyone moves on. The unspoken assumption is that at some point the answer stops being a performance and starts being real. You just know.
I'm in my (very) late thirties. I built a company, grew it, sold it. And I still don't know.
A few years ago I sold Dataroots, the company I co-founded. By most measures it was a successful exit. The kind of thing people congratulate you for at dinners and on LinkedIn. (Plus everyone expects some wannabe profound wisdom when a founder exits, right?) And look, I'm proud of it. Building Dataroots was one of the hardest, most rewarding things I've ever done.
But here's the thing nobody prepared me for: what happens after.
When I was deep in the trenches of building something, hiring, selling, firefighting, shipping, the company became everything. It filled my calendar, my headspace, my identity. At some point, without me noticing, the project started to feel like my purpose. It crept in.
If you'd asked me at the time whether Dataroots was my purpose, I would have said no, of course not. But when something takes up that much of your time and energy, it becomes all-encompassing whether you label it that way or not. (It doesn't have to be a company, by the way. Can be a lot of things in life. But for me, it was this.) I woke up in the morning and knew exactly why. The mission, the team, the next milestone. All-consuming, and in a weird way, comforting.
There's something else I underestimated. When I was that deep in, my personal life and professional life got completely entangled. My friends were my colleagues. My social life happened at work events, team dinners, offsites. My network and my org chart started to look suspiciously similar.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. In a lot of ways it was a good thing. I was building with people I genuinely cared about. But it also meant that when the company changed hands, I wasn't just losing a project. I was losing a piece of my social world too. Nobody warned me about that part.
Then the deal closed, the papers were signed, and it was gone. Not violently. More like a slow fade. I was still involved for a bit, but it wasn't mine anymore.
And that's when the quiet part hit me. It was never my purpose. It was a goal.
That distinction messed me up more than I expected. Because I'd confused a goal for a purpose, and achieving it didn't bring clarity. It brought a vacuum.
After Dataroots I told myself I'd take some time. Breathe. Travel. And, because I'm wired this way, do some serious running. I'm big into endurance sports. Scrambling, long trail runs, the kind of thing where you voluntarily wake up at 5 AM on a Saturday and call it fun. (I know.) The plan was to lean into that. Fill the space with (fun) miles for a while instead of (less fun) meetings.
Then I got injured. Badly enough that I'm still dealing with it now.
And that's where things got kinda interesting. Because running was always my pressure valve. When my brain is spinning, my legs can take over. When nothing makes sense, at least the trail does (or something like that). Take that away, and I was just... I dunno sitting there?
No company to run. No miles to log. Just the uncomfortable reality that I'm a grown adult who still doesn't have an answer to that question from childhood.
I guess at first that felt like failure. Like I'd somehow missed a step. Everyone else seems to have figured it out (or at least they're better at pretending). But the more I sat with it, the more I started to think that maybe confusing goals for purpose is the actual trap. Maybe "what do you want to be when you grow up" was always the wrong question.
I've since started building something new. AI-native from the ground up, and honestly, it's one of the most exciting things I've worked on. I'm having fun with it.
But I see it differently now. It's a project. A good one, hopefully a great one. But it's not me. And I think that's healthier. Because when Dataroots was everything, losing it felt like losing myself. I don't want to make that trade again.
The injury helped me see that, ironically. Standing still when all I wanted to do was move had a way of clarifying things. I realized how much of my identity I'd outsourced to doing. The company, the running, the next thing on the list. Strip all of that away and the question becomes: who am I when I'm not performing?
I still don't have a clean answer. I'm starting to think that's okay.
Look, I guess where I've landed (for now) is that purpose isn't a destination. It's not a company you build or a finish line you cross. It's more like a direction. Something where you feel in motion, not something you arrive at. As cliche as it sounds, the goals along the way matter. They give you structure, momentum, something to aim for. But they're not the thing itself.
I think the kid who couldn't answer "what do you want to be when you grow up" was onto something. Maybe the point was never to know.
(Oh, and the title is of course an homage to Dave Farber. RIP.)