Ada Developers Academy and Life Pivots

I had the amazing fortune to meet the charter class of Ada Developers Academy students when they took a tour of my office today.

Ada Developers Academy is a tuition-free programming school for women. The only pre-requisite (other than “for women”) is that you can’t already be a programmer.

In other words, every woman I met today woke up one morning and said “I’m going to quit my comfortable job (or education-path) and become a programmer.”

In addition, the software industry is dominated by males (unfortunately, for everybody who uses software), so not only did these folks make a risky life-pivot, they also pivoted into an industry where the deck is stacked against them.

This takes an amount of moxie that I may never comprehend, and meeting the class was very inspirational. It got me thinking about how the metaphor of startup pivots (i.e. a course-correction designed to test a hypothesis about the business) can be applied to life.

The common (and incorrect) definition of a startup’s “runway” is “the amount of time a startup has until it runs out of money.” A more accurate definition is “the number of pivots a startup can make before it runs out of money.” In other words, the number of new things it can try, the number of experiments it can run.

Perhaps the “runway” of your life isn’t the amount of time you have left to live, but it’s the number of interesting, experimental things you can do before your time is up?

Just as a business should structure itself to get to each pivot faster (by finding ways to learn at lower cost and in a shorter time), one should structure one’s life to get to get to the interesting parts faster!

How can you structure your life like this? There are probably countless ways, but here are a few that come to mind:

1. Have interesting friends (and the harsh corollary: don’t waste your time with boring or uninspiring people)
2. Live someplace interesting where you can make lots of interesting friends (and do interesting stuff with them)
3. Double-check your life assumptions every once in a while. Who knows what you’ll find?

PS: Registration for the next ADA program is almost open. Check it out if you’re a female in the Seattle area (or willing to relocate).

(I tried something new on this post and didn’t spend much time editing it. The result is probably more raw and train-of-thought, but also closer to the original vision in my head. What do you think?)