Living a Thousand Lives

One of my greatest regrets in life is this: if I’m lucky, I’ll only get to live a handful of jobs.

Childhood dreams are a funny thing. Most kids swap what they want to be as they grow. Firefighter one week. Doctor the next. Soccer player after that.

But mine stacked instead of swapped.

Like many kids, I first dreamed to be paleontologist. Because what’s cooler than dinosaurs? The truth is, I’d still love to be a paleontologist.

I then dreamt of being a hockey player. A chef. An actor. A pilot. A carpenter. An astronaut.

Even, at one point, an olympic figure skater. (Elvis Stojko was a big deal in Canada.)

I wanted to be them all. And the truth is—I still do.

I’ve been fortunate to have lived a few lives already. Freelancer. Software Engineer. Founder. Product Designer. Design Manager. Product Manager.

Each one gave me a different lens. Each showed me new ways of approaching problems. Yet there are thousands more I dream of doing. The list is endless. My time here is not.

I’ve come to realize the best I can do instead is to create products used by millions, maybe billions.

It’s hard to explain why this feels like enough—why building software can scratch the same itch as wanting to explore the ocean floor or perform surgery or teach kindergarten.

Steve Jobs captures part of what I mean when he said:

“There’s lots of ways to be, as a person. And some people express their deep appreciation in different ways. But one of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out there.

And you never meet the people. You never shake their hands. You never hear their story or tell yours. But somehow, in the act of making something with a great deal of care and love, something’s transmitted there. And it’s a way of expressing to the rest of our species our deep appreciation. So we need to be true to who we are and remember what’s really important to us.”

— Steve Jobs, 2007

Steve captures something here that so many of us feel but struggle to articulate.

The products we make become our love language to the world, design the dialect in which we speak it.

He says something subtle there that stuck with me: “in the act of making something with a great deal of care and love, something’s transmitted there.”

What’s transmitted?

For me, it’s the profound act of standing on the shoulders of those who came before. It’s continuing their legacy.

Every minute of my existence has been shaped by someone else’s invention. The bed I woke up in this morning—designed by someone who understood ergonomics and materials. The clothes I put on—crafted by people who mastered textiles, dyes, and manufacturing. The coffee I drink—cultivated by farmers who perfected growing techniques passed down through generations. The car I drive—engineered by countless minds who solved problems of combustion, aerodynamics, and safety.

Inventions, mathematics, processes, fuels, languages. Antibiotics and anesthesia. The written word and the printing press. Electricity and the internet. All of these have been discovered, iterated, refined, improved upon by others before me. People who lived their one life in service of an idea, a craft, a solution to human problems.

Steve Jobs echoes this idea as well, when he writes:

I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow.
I did not breed or perfect the seeds.
I do not make any of my own clothing.
I speak a language did not invent or refine.
I did not discover the mathematics I use.
I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate.
I am moved by music I did not create myself.
When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive.
I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with.
I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being.

Yet, even this still feels incomplete. Jobs only speaks of these as things as things he depends on.

There has to be more. There’s something greater that gets transmitted.

To me, it’s about building upon one another’s work through the products we create ourselves. To keep the lives of those who have passed living by building products on top of their work.

When I write code, I’m building on programming languages created by brilliant computer scientists. When I design an interface, I’m using principles discovered by psychologists and refined by decades of designers. When I solve a product problem, I’m applying frameworks developed by strategists and entrepreneurs who came before.

It’s not only dependence, it’s inheritance.

When you create—truly create with care and intention—you don’t just build something new. You continue each person’s legacy who created before you. You’ve extended their time on this floating rock. You become a conduit for their dreams, their late nights, their breakthroughs, their failures that taught the next person what not to do.

In this way, creating something, lets you live a thousand lives more.