An Entrepreneur’s Take on Choices - Part 1
By Shahzil (Shaz) Amin
Choices suck. They suck because I can’t blame anyone else if I make the wrong choice. It’s my decision to make and, thus, I should appropriately weigh every option and how it can affect my future. Life would be so much simpler if someone else made these choices for me and I could happily say, “It wasn’t my choice” and escape responsibility. There are no expectations of people who don’t have the ability to make their own choices. And sometimes, that’s nice – not having to meet expectations.
Every single day I’m presented with so many choices and many times, I’m not sure what to do. The most common question I get is, “How do you split your time between Blue Track Media, Plugged, and Karlani Capital? How do you choose what to work on first?” And every single time my response is, “I don’t know.”
Every day, it seems like I’m unable to focus on one thing for more than 5-10 minutes. And every day, I feel like I’m failing at all three things and I’m on the verge of a colossal breakdown. On a recent day, I went to play basketball and all I could think about was why the hell can’t I find time to play the sport I love anymore? You would think BTM, Plugged and Karlani are all I want to be working on? No, that foolish child in me, to this day, wants to become the best basketball player I can possibly become. Why? Because I know I can keep improving my skill even if I can’t go professional. But how the hell do I find time for the sport I love? What choices must I make? Do I work on being the best basketball player or the best entrepreneur or the best investor? I want to be all those and then some.
I don’t need people to sit here and tell me the software they use to manage their time effectively and focus on their tasks. Screw your software. Tell me which software is going to keep me from making the wrong choices in my life so I can focus on what really matters. But that’s the thing, everything matters! So how can it or I really choose? Basketball matters. BTM matters. Plugged matters. Karlani matters. Family and friends matter. Acquiring knowledge matters. This is called venting. Venting is when you start your story off talking about choices, segue to basketball and then try to reassure yourself that you’re just venting and tomorrow you’ll be back on the saddle until this overload happens again in a few days and then you fall right off the saddle again.
Rinse and repeat.
This journey I’m on is more mental than physical. Entrepreneurship is all about the constant mental struggle of who I want to be in the future vs. who I am today. You won’t see any articles from me that talk about why Facebook, Google or Apple are relevant. There are plenty of exceptional journalists, bloggers and opinion makers who cover these companies very well. I will probably say nothing that you haven’t already heard from someone else about these current trends. But what you will get from me is honest, personal and live commentary about my foolish quest to conquer the world and make it a better place. The only thing I’m an expert on is what goes on in my head and how I deal with it.
Choices suck.
But although choices suck, there is a way to handle them. But that’s not to say that I still won’t break down. (Shahzil (Shaz) Amin started his first company, Blue Track Media right out of high school, and started his second company Plugged Inc. while attending the University of Texas at Dallas. Last year, he sold Blue Track Media to a Philadelphia and NY-based venture capital firm, Karlani Capital, and is now its managing partner. Blue Track Media was previously named one of the top 30 startups to watch by Entrepreneur Magazine. Shahzil has also been featured in publications like Forbes, the Business Insider and Tech Cocktail)
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