―
G.K. Chesterton,
This quote has stuck with me for years (so much so it hangs on the walls in my office). It’s how I feel every day and it is why we will never stop building companies and tools.
Whenever you stand next to an ocean, a mountain, or a vast anything, you realize how small you are. When you look at Twitter and the news you realize how little impact you can make.
I believe that all people are created equal and have been given the inclination to fight disorder and entropy. With that, it also becomes easy to feel contempt because everything that’s inside of you rails against the seeming reality of how little impact you can have on the world and the things around you.
It then becomes easy to fall in love with the trivial because it seems like the only option and way to fight boredom. But you and I both know it comes with guilt and shame at the end of that road, as it goes against what we were made to do - to put things back in order.
To have ' a fiercer delight and fiercer discontentment' implies you have some say in the world, that your efforts can matter, and that you will go down fighting until you can’t fight anymore.
As soon as you throw in the towel, the surly contentment sets in, it’s a juxtaposition, it’s not real contentment. It’s a complaining sitting in your chair about the world type of contentment, which is no contentment at all. To be surly is to be angry, passive, aggressive, and lazy….sounds like much of ‘corporate America’.
To boil this down to software terms, because after all, we are a product studio and this is our blog - it means that people put up with crappy tools for far too long because they feel like they can’t do anything about it and deal with it.
This is a horrible place to be and makes you want to quit your job. Maybe in a good way, so you can go create some of the tools that delight people like yourself. Or makes you want to quit your job and go do something mundane or figure out a way to escape and hit the booze or veg out on TikTok, or some other boredom killer. Some might channel this frustration into creating better tools, while others may seek escape from mundane tasks or distractions.
Firm Studio is meant to be a vehicle to fight against the surly contentment in the B2B service company realm. We plan to combine our skills with knowledgeable individuals who understand the problems that need to be solved. They share our desire to challenge this discontentment.
We’re going to attempt to wrap our skill sets around really smart people with entrenched knowledge who know of the problems that need to be solved and are on the same page that they want to fight against that surly discontentment.
Mind you, you have to be completely crazy to go up against the behemoth who has been there for 20 to 40 years employing various tactics to maintain their dominance. However, we believe it's worth the fight to storm the castle and go against the ogre.
