Dreaming about Driven
We need more people like Marc Fleury and Miguel de Icaza. Both have an energy and aptitude for inspiring and galvanizing people. These guys are destined to accomplish big things. How do we create that drive in ourselves and control our destiny?
Marc Fleury is the driving force behind JBoss. If you haven’t heard of him, his company, or his J2EE application server, you soon will. They are shaking up the server market with advanced features and free licensing that have the proprietary vendors running scared. While BEA works on integrating their Workshop and Portal products with the server, Marc and crew have perfected the J2EE stack. When you read his “Blue Paper”, you can feel the excitement and drive. People laughed at his ideas and then one day he got angry and wrote his own EJB Container.
Miguel de Icaza is no less interesting, having started a desktop system called GNOME that will soon be a Windows XP killer. Walmart already sells PCs running Linux. Miguel’s company, Ximian, also releases Evolution, a mail client that duplicates Microsoft Outlook, and will soon surpass it. Nobody ticked off Miguel though. He even embraces Microsoft technology, porting .NET to Linux with his Mono project.
These guys are luminaries in the community. They pack the seats at conferences, and you can feel their energy just by entering the room. And they’re everywhere at once. You see them at the top of the CVS commit list, and on the mailing lists helping users. They shine so bright, they steal the show. I was listening to a presentation by Jim Gettys of X Window System fame, when he forgot where a structure lived in the code that he was describing. Miguel piped up from the audience to announce where the module lived in the tree, as he browsed it from his laptop.
If you watch VH1’s “Driven,” then you know what I’m talking about. These people don’t talk about “if” they do something, it’s always “when” they do it. You see their friends interviewed and they say, “she always talked like she was already a star.” Reality shifts around these people as their ideas transform space and substance. If everything including matter is made up of energy, and thought is also energy, can your thoughts influence outcomes? I think that they do.
The problem is building up the passion to generate that much positive thinking. Maybe I just lack the “driven” gene. Maybe if I weren’t so busy watching reality TV, I could create some reality of my own.
May 6th, 2003 at 10:49 am
Great post, Eric. So what do Marc and Miguel have that we don’t have? More smarts? That’s probably true (at least in my case). But what I think they have that most people don’t is a PASSION for what they do. I’ve thought about this subject for quite some time since I’ve always felt that the key to happiness is finding out what your passion is and doing that for a living.
Passion. Dictionary.com has this definition:
1. A powerful emotion, such as love, joy, hatred, or anger.
2. a. Boundless enthusiasm: His skills as a player don’t quite match his passion for the game.
2. b. The object of such enthusiasm: Soccer is her passion.
Saying that word sometimes feels so foreign. Most days I feel like a single sheep in a herd of millions trudging along to work everyday.
I certainly enjoy programming since I love the sensation of building something from literally “nothing”. However, the only programming that I’ve really enjoyed has been that which I have had an interest, dare I say “passion”?, in doing. That pretty much rules out 98% of the coding that I’ve done during my professional career. What’s do damn exciting about coding up some obscure business application? wee.
I recently put this book on reserve at the library. I’m excited to read it just because of the possibilities that I dream about when I think about doing something that I love for a living.
Ask yourself … Do I love what I do right now? Do I still want to do it in five years?