Juggling
Working at a startup is like juggling.
Every day you take a deep breath and throw a whole bunch of new balls in the air and pray to god they just don’t come back down on fire.
Mind you, they do all come back down one way or another. And then you throw them back up the next day, slightly more sure that they won’t come back down on fire than you were the previous day.
After a while, you’re pretty good at juggling. You don’t drop any balls. Shoot, you may even add another ball.
But wait. One comes down on fire. You can’t put it out right away while it’s in your hand so you throw it back in the air. It lights other balls on fire.
Shit.
So you slowly take each ball out of the juggle one-by-one. You put out all the fires, you re-introduce each ball slowly.
You’re at 100% again. You stay there for a while, making sure everything looks okay. One ball comes down on fire, you hand it to your friend. She puts out the fire and re-introduces the ball. A while later another comes down on fire, you put this one out yourself. Your friend is still on standby just in case.
After a while, you’ve got a system for putting out fires.
You finally add that next ball. You take a deep breath.
