The sun was coming out, just peeking through from behind the tall pine trees on the hill above my house, as I drove into the office this morning.  I’d woken up before dawn and gotten back on the computer.

Does my title to this post seem paradoxical? A twist on the old “the harder I work, the luckier I get” saying? Yes, but it’s also true. At least, and Thank God for it, it’s been true for me.

I’ve been sleeping poorly the last few weeks because I have three projects converging. I like all three.  I wake up just before dawn and instead of turning over and going back to sleep, I’m up. Because I’m excited about making progress.

And this is a good thing. Okay: not getting enough sleep isn’t that good; I tend to drag in the afternoons. But being excited about projects, waking up early because the work intrigues me: that’s a good thing.

Which reminds me that a lot of my entrepreneurship has been escaping boredom. We needed the money so I couldn’t not work, but I could determine what work was. The first time I went out on my own I left a good job because it meant supervising other people doing the work I liked to do, instead of just doing the work I like to do. In the maker/manager scale I wanted to be maker, not manager.

I built Palo Alto Software around business planning because I came to love software and business planning. So there it was: creating the company to create the job I wanted.

So the luckier I get, the harder I work. And I love it.

(Photo credit: by Bushman.K via Flickr)