This business tale is written by Duke University undergraduate student, Kenny Gould. Business Tales From College is a weekly series. Read stories from current and former college students about their experience starting a business during college.
There are rare occasions when I wake up and have no idea where I am. On my birthday last year, for instance, I ended up in Montreal. Montreal is about 300 miles from where I thought I went to bed.
Most times, however, the wake up is less literal and more figurative wake up. We’ve all had that feeling: one minute we’re spacing out, and the next minute we come to the startling realization that we really don’t know what’s going on. I call this the wake up phenomenon. Yes, we’ve all experienced the wake up phenomenon. While we have all experienced it, few realize what it actually means in regards to the business world.
The figurative wake up phenomenon happened to me the other day when I was in a chemistry lab at Duke University. I’m not the biggest science guy. As an English major who plans on going to business school, I don’t often go to the chemistry lab. By “don’t often go,” I mean that I had never been. My partner, Dave, is the sciencey one. However, I didn’t think it would hurt to learn more about the product I was working with. Thus, I agreed to help out with some chemical tests. At some point during the process, I stopped paying attention to the experiment we were running and started focusing on one of the chemists across the room. He was talking to one of his colleagues. I don’t know what I noticed about him first: the ponytail, the handlebar mustache, or the elemental symbols tattooed on each of his arms. I listened carefully.
“Right after the first time I dropped out of graduate school, I started playing World of Warcraft,” he said. “I spent a lot of my time wandering through different lands, trying to gather different herbs to make little potions. After a few months, it hit me: chemistry is like World of Warcraft, but in real life. Instead of working tirelessly to get the next big sword, you work tirelessly to make the next big scientific discovery!”
The man’s comment, combined with the beakers, test tubes, and endless rows of incredibly toxic chemicals that lined the walls of the lab, suddenly woke me up. I realized that while Dave was perfectly at home, I was completely out of my element (pun intended) in that chemistry lab. All I remembered from biology was reproduction, all I remembered from physics was that gravity existed sometimes, and all I remembered from chemistry was that pure potassium, when immersed in water, would catch fire. It was quite apparent that the chemistry department was not where my worth to the company was added.
Later that day, I sat down to write a thank-you letter to the chemistry professor who had let us use his lab. The words flowed out of my pen and arranged themselves into neat, grammatically correct sentences. While writing, I did not question my position. Not once did I space out, and not once did I experience the wake up phenomenon. While the chemistry lab was not where I belonged, behind a pen or a keyboard certainly was. By specializing, Dave and I remain productive.
After thinking for a little while, I wrote a little note on the pad of paper beside my computer. “It is important to be important,” it said. Under that, I wrote, “which witch is which?” because I thought it sounded cool.
So what makes you important? If you are having too many wake up moments, it may be time to ask yourself this question. Too often in entrepreneurship, we desire to be the jack-of-all-trades. It was our idea, so why shouldn’t we be the only one to develop it? In order to maximize efficiency, however, specialization is the way to go. The most productive businesses are the ones that minimize the wake up. If you find yourself waking up every time you do a certain task, bring on someone else who is good in that field to do it.
Trust me, it will be a lot easier than trying to understand a French-Canadian accent at 7:30 in the morning.
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Kenny Gould is a student at Duke University from Charlotte, North Carolina. When he is not writing, Kenny enjoys fulfilling his role as the COO of CarBone, a company that recycles organic material for use in oxygen batteries and modern electronics.
