I was a huge fan of Ducktales growing up. I can still sing the majority of the intro song, recall most of the characters, and was always willing to allow for the physical impossibility of both Scrooge’s ability to swim through money and the existence of Duckburg as a city where dogs and various billed fowl lived in cross-species harmony.

The really interesting thing about the show, looking back, is the perfect embodiment of the Horatio Alger ideal in Scrooge McDuck. In fact, He seems to have been a thinly veiled stand in for Andrew Carnegie - a poor Scottish lad who made good through his wits and work.

As a kid, of course, there was always the repeated message told in Scrooge’s origin story: Work Smarter, not Harder (he discovers this while earning money as a shoeshine…there’s a great scene with a bicycle powered shoeshine device, but more on that another time), and success and riches will follow. But now I’m actually running my own company, and the lie of Scrooge’s words becomes obvious.

Much as I try, working smarter as opposed to harder is never a clear trade off. More than that, smarter isn’t necessarily what I made it out to be. Oftentimes, clever is a much better categorization of what we have to do - from prioritization decisions on features to design choices, to customer interaction methods. And even if you’re as clever as can be, you still have to work harder.

And then, of course, there’s the fact that even if you’re working smarter, you still have to work harder. And harder isn’t the only other piece of the equation. Harder is, I guess, a measure of time spent times the difficulty of that task (T*D). But the real issue is how fast you can do it. Throughput ((T*D)^RPM), in this kind of an environment is critical because, odds are, there’s someone else just as smart, clever, and hard working as you out there, so you need to keep one step ahead all the time. You can’t do that by working hard on lateral problems, you can only do it by solving the problems that are absolutely necessary to getting that next customer, and to keeping the majority of the ones you already have.

If anything, Scrooge was selling it easy. That’s fine, because he could swim through solid matter. I’m not so lucky, so I am constantly working with Josh and Ryan to figure out how to figure out what we need to do next, and how to execute on it without killing the 20 other things we have to do. That challenge has only gotten bigger as we’ve started to grow, and it’s only going to get bigger as we grow some more.

I’m ready for it.