Keep going.

It's 1999.
You're about to open Macromedia Flash 4
It will change your life.
You'll go deep into design and programming.
You'll fall in love with both.

High school won't be so bad.
You'll make the senior soccer team, but barely play.
It happens.

Your sister will buy you a Samsung Yepp YP-55 MP3 player.
It will hold glorious 18 songs.
You're blessed to have her so don't annoy her too much.

You'll be fortunate to attend the University of Waterloo.
It will be really, really hard. Keep going.
You'll walk out resilient. Waterloo will shape you.

You'll work at BlackBerry.
See how great Canada can be when it dreams.
You'll learn to change problems when you can't solve them.
And see firsthand how quickly companies can disappear.
Keep going.

You'll move to Seattle to work at Amazon.
Learn what it means to be in the business of happy customers.
Come to terms that growth requires a real willingness to fail.

Keep going with the puns.
You'll make a bad fantastic math joke.
And be stunned when your (future) wife actually laughs.
That's how you'll know.

After school, you'll start your own company.
It will fail. Don't beat yourself up.
(You will anyway.)
Keep going.

You'll join Maluuba.
You'll work on AI assistants a decade before they're cool.
The product will be too early and wrong.
Keep going. It will be a lesson you need to learn.

You'll move to San Francisco.
The Bay Area really is a parody of itself.
The people, though, will surprise you with their kindness.
The outdoors are more beautiful than you can imagine.

You'll join Amplitude as their first designer.
Spend 4 years imagining analytics as a social product.
You'll help people play with their data for the first time.

You'll join Quora.
Learn the power of questions.
And how important context is in order to understand an answer.

You'll join Airtable.
Spend 4 years building interfaces designed to be endlessly customized.
You'll learn a product's neurotic and obsessive users show the way.

You'll realize makers leave a signature on their products

These years will pass in a blur.
Keep going.

Through it all, you'll wear many hats.
Software engineer, founder, designer, product manager.
Others will see differences between these roles more than you do.
Keep going.

Remember this: the late nights, the launch emails, the celebrations, all of those will pale in comparison to how blessed you'll feel to work with some of the smartest, kindest, most earnest people.

And all the typical life advice?
Almost all true.

Call your parents more often.
They will always be your biggest supporters.
Floss regularly. Go to the gym more.
You probably don't need to buy another domain name.

Your kids want your time more than anything.
Make more messy crafts, more baked goods.
They'll grow up even faster than people warn you.

Tell people you love them more often.

Keep going and you'll soon be ready to start your next company.
You'll try again what you wanted to do now—except it will feel different.

Right now, you create because you're surprised you can.
Because new is exciting.
Because you love being the first to see something before others.
Those reasons will no longer matter to you.

After all these years, after all these experiences, you'll learn to love building because it's a way to live a thousand lives.

Keep going.