What’s easier now than later? George Northup responds

August 9 2 Comments latest by Rich Jerk

Reminder: Last week, I wrote a post called It Never Gets Easier Than Now. This week I’m featuring responses from people I admire on what’s easier to do when we’re younger. This is the final entry in the series.

George Northup, CEO of Auctiondrop, writes:

In my twenties i had no wife and children, no mortgage, and time seemed unlimited. It was an ideal time to delve deep into career pursuits, working 24X7 passionately and, at the same time, there was somehow ample time left over to pursue intellectual, social, pursuits outside the office.

For example, during my twenties, I helped turn a $5 million company into a $150 million company in under 18 months. At the same time, despite massive office time, I trained every night until midnight to run the marine corps marathon–which i finished successfully. Also during this time, i was president of the Duke University alummi group in Washington D.C. and grew this membership from 500 to over 6,000 members. Lastly, I also taught myself to sail during this period and spent many, many weekends sailing in the chesapeake bay. Also, I found it easy to attend virtually any social event, reception, concert at a moment’s notice and was always out doing things.

To summarize, the twenties are a great time to take advantage of working hard, exploring, growing, meeting and cultivating friends. One continues this later in life, but it becomes more challenging as responsibilities suck up time…

If you read this and think to yourself, “Oh, that fancy CEO…maybe he could do that, but I never could,” you’re committing The Shrug Effect.

See the original article that inspired this, It Never Gets Easier Than Now.

Other responses

• Seth Godin, author, entrepreneur, and speaker [response]
• Mark Hurst, founder, Good Experience [response]
• Debbie Newhouse, training specialist at Google [response]
• Meetpaul Singh, Stanford BS, MD, MBA, and venture capitalist [response]
• Dr. BJ Fogg, Stanford professor and director of the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab [response]
• Karen Watts and Robin Dellabough, partners at book-production firm Lark Productions [response]
• Chris Yeh, Stanford/HBS grad, entrepreneur, and marketing chief at Symphoniq [response]

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Posted August 9, 2006 under Personal entrepreneurship

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