There and Back Again: Returning to Seattle

Rob Collie (00:00): Hello friends. There's a bit of a coming full circle vibe in this week's episode because by the time you hear this, I will no longer be here. And by here I mean, well, here. This basement podcast studio in the Indianapolis suburbs has served me well. I've recorded over 170 episodes in the comfy, sound dampened cocoon that I've got here. But as soon as I'm done recording this one, I'm breaking down this whole room so it can be packed onto a moving truck because we're moving back to Seattle after an unexpected and frankly involuntary 15 year adventure in the American Midwest. It's said that all good stories fit a pattern. The protagonist or protagonists, they start off living a relatively ordinary life, but then there's a sudden interruption. They get called away from that calm existence, often involuntarily. A crisis is thrust upon them. So they leave home, they go on an adventure, it changes them, and then crucially, they return home, but they return home as a different person.

(01:10): So the hero leaves and then comes back. Luke Skywalker leaves Tatooine in the first Star Wars. He's living a boring farmer's life and then there's a sudden responsibility thrust upon him. To top things off, his home is destroyed and his surrogate parents are killed. But why did George Lucas have him return to Tatooine? Of all the gillion planets in the galaxy, it's super unlikely that he came back to Tatooine in the beginning of the third movie. Well, the reason George Lucas wrote it that way is explicitly to tie in with this pattern. He wanted the first reveal of Luke in his newfound full Jedi powers. He wanted that to happen in a place that audiences would instinctively perceive as full circle. A completion of an arc. It added gravity to everything that came afterwards in that movie. Well, at least until the teddy bear showed up, I guess.

(02:05): And why is that pattern, that arc, so powerful? Apparently it's coated in our DNA somehow because this pattern appears in every culture's great stories throughout history. An American professor named Joseph Campbell famously studied all of the great myths and tales from the world's cultures and explicitly identified this pattern. He called it the Hero's Journey. But authors of novels and movies, they were following this pattern long before he coined the phrase. It was obvious to all storytellers. Heck, not only does Bilbo Baggins follow this arc in The Hobbit, but then at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings, we see him finishing up his autobiography and it's entitled, There and Back Again. There and Back Again. What a powerful concept. I like that better than calling it the Hero's Journey even. Because you don't have to be a hero to experience a there and back again arc.

(03:00): Of course, I never expected my life to get turned upside down, for me to get forced out of my comfort zone, to do terrifying things, but it did happen. In 2009, my life took an unexpected turn when my ex-wife decided to move back to Ohio and take my kids with her. At the time, this felt like an existential crisis, like the end of the world. My entire career up until that point had been spent in Seattle working for Microsoft as a product manager on the engineering teams. I was good at that job. I helped build some amazing products. But there were no jobs like that in Cleveland. And in 2009, we didn't have anything resembling the remote work culture that we do today. So I either had to give up seeing my kids or give up my career. And as terrifying as it was, it really seemed like no choice at all, I had to follow the kids.

(03:52): And folks, it was absolutely terrifying. Because I had never been a brave person. I had always been an anxious and frankly risk averse person. I knew that I wanted to be brave and I had been working on changing that about myself in tiny little steps, but I had not made a lot of progress on that self-improvement when this crisis landed on me. I literally had to move to Cleveland without my next job lined up. It felt like walking the plank, except not knowing how far down the water was or even if there was water down there to even land in. Now, I want to stop for a moment and explicitly disavow the phrase, the Hero's Journey. Again, I much prefer there and back again. I'm not here to humble brag myself into the title of hero because I was anything but.

(04:40): The fact is, at that point in time, I'd made a mess of my life and I'd been a mess of a person really without realizing it. I was talented enough for sure that Microsoft was able to make use of me, and fundamentally, I was warm and caring and kind at my core, but I had a lot of bad habits and defense mechanisms that I wasn't aware of and wasn't prepared to acknowledge or own up to. Oftentimes, I'm ashamed to say, I would export those problems into the world and make them other people's problems. I was a very confusing person to be around, in hindsight, because of this complex mix of good and bad characteristics. To co-opt the Star Wars metaphor again, the light and dark sides of the force were very much at war within me. And also the darker stuff did 100% trace back to fears within me.

(05:28): Now, I took all of that with me on the trip into the scary world. And it turned out that those more negative traits were quite a bit more problematic and even more pronounced outside the safe-ish environs of Microsoft. Fewer safety mechanisms, fewer support systems, more stress, more fear. Whatever safety mechanisms and padding I'd benefited from in my career and in my life up until that point, well poof, it was all now raw and grinding against the world, and the world was grinding right back. The last 15 years have absolutely, by far, been the hardest of my life. In retrospect, yeah, that fits the there and back again pattern because the middle of the story is always challenging. Luke confronted stormtroopers and monsters and the incredibly scary Darth Vader. He even had his hand chopped off. Well, I've lived the first-world, tamer, nonviolent, Earth-based equivalent of that. There's nothing quite like starting a business and learning all of the hard lessons the hard way. You learn over time why so few people do it.

(06:36): To complete the metaphor, I've even had two severe injuries each requiring major surgery, one of which I had to pay cash for because I gambled without health insurance. It's like my equivalent of having my dad chop my hand off like Luke. Yeah, I prefer this timeline to Luke's for sure, but my life felt like it was teetering on the brink in those moments. In the end, if we can call today and end career-wise, things turned out great just via an unexpected pathway. Microsoft let me stay on for nearly a whole year while I found my footing and I used that time to discover that the thing I've been working on last, Power Pivot, which is the forerunner to Power BI, I discovered that it was really, really good, way better than I expected good.

(07:18): I started the Power Pivot Pro blog in 2009 as a means purely of getting my name out there, to help me find some boring but stable job working in IT somewhere in Cleveland. And I expected to then abandon the blog at the end of my Microsoft grace period and go take that job, whatever that job was going to be. Neither of those happened. Along the way, it became so incredibly clear to me that I was seeing the future in advance, and this was a super, super important thing for people to hear about. So I ended up writing two blog posts a week for many year and I turned down those boring job offers in local IT.

(07:56): In fact, at one point near the end of that grace period tenure with Microsoft, Microsoft came to me and offered me a different job at Microsoft, and I turned that down. If that job had been offered to me from the beginning when I first moved to Cleveland, I would've snapped it up. But the idea of pursuing Power Pivot, which again later became Power BI, pursuing that as the focus of my career had become too consuming, too captivating to continue at Microsoft. So in February 2010, I let the Microsoft phase of my career go and started the next phase, the one in which my wife Jocelyn and I founded P3.

(08:32): But as you might've heard me joke about before, that motivational banner hanging in a wrestling gym somewhere that says, "We do these things not because they're easy, but because we thought they would be easy." My God, yes. So, so much harder than I imagined. I'm not really the entrepreneur type. I had an idea for a business, one that didn't exist anywhere in the world at time, and that proved to be a good idea, a good invention. But making it run, well, I was poorly equipped for that, especially in the beginning. Now, fortunately I found people who were good at the things that I was not and I've also learned from them too over the years. It's almost like today I am reasonably equipped to start the business that I did a long time ago. But a big part of that being equipped today is the humility to accept that I can't do it alone.

(09:22): That humility was hard won, which is another way of saying that I was really stubborn. But I think that lesson has now been deeply, deeply encoded in me. I will never again believe that individuals are at the center of things. Humans are a fundamentally collaborative species. End of story. They say that all is well, that ends well. And if you look just at today and ignore all of the crushing stress in the middle, that certainly has been the case in terms of career. The P3 adventure is far from over, but it's already been the most unexpected and most gratifying thing I've ever been part of as a professional. It's just truly great. So at this point, you're probably thinking that there and back again for me is career related. He's going back to Seattle to return to Microsoft.

(10:08): Oh, contraire. Not in the least. No. To the extent that the last 15 years fit the traditional arc, it's been a personal journey much more than a professional one. On the personal front, the past 15 years have also been incredibly challenging. The stresses of moving, of giving up our circles of friends, of being strangers in two different cities, first in Cleveland and then again in Indy when my ex moved there for her career too. We've been the kind of weird, semi-introverted work from home 40-somethings who are living in cities where most of the people who live there grew up there and therefore already have established social circles. 15 years of isolation takes a toll. Now, here's where another one of my favorite jokes makes an appearance. It's very important when distinguishing between one's ex-wife and one's actual wife to use the adjective actual as opposed to something like, I don't know, current.

(11:05): To the logical brain, current seems like the mathematically correct contrast to X, but it carries a bit of temporary connotation, doesn't it? As I discovered the very first time that it left my mouth and entered my own ears. Well, Jocelyn, my actual wife, my forever wife, she came with me on this journey. There and back again is her story every bit as much as mine. In some ways, even more so. She lived all of this stress, more of it really, because being a stepmom on top of all of that is a special kind of difficult. And for long stretches of this journey, we kind of lost each other. And while that's definitely sad, I'm happy to report that we've been there and back again on that front as well. It's unsurprising in hindsight that closeness is lost when you're hiding in a foxhole for a decade and a half while artillery falls all around you.

(11:56): But we stuck together through it and we've come out the other side stronger than we ever would've been if we'd stayed in our safe comfort zone in 2009. All of those rough edges we took with us into the unforgiving real world, they did make life much harder. But that same unforgiving real world, it served as a grindstone and as a mirror. We've grown as people in ways that I'd never would've even thought about before we left. So the back again part of this journey is not about P3. We're a remote company, we can live wherever we want, and there's a lot of unfinished business here. We're really just getting started making our mark on the marketplace. I look forward to it. And of course there is some tangential benefit to me being back in the city where most of the tech comes from. I'm going to be interacting socially again with many members of the teams at Microsoft who build this stuff for us.

(12:48): Heck, I'm even going to be hanging out with, ah gasp, Tableau employees. So that kind of immersion will certainly be helpful as we calibrate our way forward at P3. But the real treasure, as the meme goes, is the self-awareness, humility, and personal growth we gained along the way. It's been a rough 15 years. It's not something I'd ever like to go through again. But it's over now. The kids are grown. We did the thing that we left Seattle to do. And I'm super, super, super grateful for the experience of it because I like this version of me so much more than I like the version of me who left The Shire originally. So thank you very much for listening, now, in the past, and in the future. Thank you for being even a small part of this journey. Some of you have been here for damn near all of it, and I appreciate that so much. So I'll catch you soon for my new podcast studio in Seattle.