Okay, so I saw the news the other day, Brandon Jennings retired. Man, that hit me kinda weird. Not like, sad or anything, but it just got me thinking, you know?
Thinking Back on Things
It took me back to when I first started my own little side project, years ago. I wasn’t trying to be a pro athlete or anything, obviously, but I had these huge plans for this online thing I was building. I spent weeks, maybe months, sketching it all out. I remember buying a new notebook just for this, filling it with diagrams, user flows, all that stuff.
I got up early before my day job, stayed up late after. I was really hyped, telling my wife, my buddies, “This is gonna be it!” I really believed it. I started coding, learned some new tricks along the way. Hit a wall with some database thing, spent like three days figuring that out. Then integrated some payment thing, that was another headache. But I pushed through, piece by piece.
Launched the first version. It was… okay. Not the big splash I expected. A few users trickled in. I kept working on it, adding features, fixing bugs. Every weekend, plugging away. But the momentum, that initial fire I had, it started to fade a bit. It wasn’t exploding like I thought it would, like Jennings burst onto the scene, you know? High expectations meet reality.
Then life kinda happened. We had our first kid. Priorities shifted, big time. Suddenly, those late nights and early mornings weren’t just tiring, they felt kinda selfish. My focus had to change. I didn’t just quit the project cold turkey, but I definitely scaled back. A lot.
I remember sitting down one evening, looking at my code, looking at my analytics dashboard with its tiny numbers, and then looking at my kid sleeping. It wasn’t even a hard decision, really. I just knew. Time to pivot. Time to kinda ‘retire’ that version of my dream.
So, I stopped pushing so hard on the growth side. I simplified it, made it easier to maintain. It still runs today, brings in a tiny bit of coffee money, but it’s not the empire I envisioned. And that’s okay. Seeing Jennings retire, thinking about all that potential and how careers twist and turn with injuries and stuff, it just reminded me that things don’t always go according to the grand plan. You adjust, you find what works, you move on. It’s just part of the process, I guess.
