Dance with uncertainty, embrace it, and use it as an opportunity to grow.

1/ Since leaving active duty I've put on several different civilian uniforms/internships/jobs. In the photo are just a few of the business cards I've had since 2009. A bit of my journey has been figuring out what I did not want to do in order to figure out what I wanted to do.

2/ Over the past few years, one of my favorite quotes is from a fellow United States Military Academy at West Point classmate, Socrates Rosenfeld of Jane Technologies, Inc.:

“If we can just start to feel comfortable in our uncertainty and embrace it and be patient with it and understand that this is a process that's evolving for, can stay true to ourselves. Beautiful things emerged from uncertainty. And it's really hard, man. It's easy for me to say. It's very hard to do. But I find that the true artists of life, the people who tend to redefine themselves across different chapters of their lives that continue to grow, they've been able to dance with uncertainty and embrace it and use it as a, as a stage to grow. Man, the sooner we realize that as veterans, life becomes not this thing that you must endure, but this dance that you get to experience.”

3/ I gauge the strength of startups/companies on a quantitative and qualitative analysis.

Quantitative: burn rate, revenue growth, margins, etc...

The qualitative analysis is just as important: team and leadership morale, how many more ideas do they have, what opportunities can they explore, what momentum do they have, etc....

4/ In early stage startups and also for (recently) transitioning veterans this is so often the case: "The moral(e) is to the physical (in this case numbers) as three is to one." - supposedly Napoleon

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