If you’ve built a business of any size, you probably have quite a few memories about the journey to get there. Some are good, some are bad, but they all helped to build the story of where things stand today. Beyond memories, though, did you actually record anything? Probably not.
Many of us are good about capturing those moments in our personal lives, thankfully, but we often skip recording those moments as we’re growing our businesses.
In his book “Shoe Dog”, Phil Knight laments the thought that he never recorded anything from the early days of Nike. In his words:
I struggle to remember. I close my eyes and think back, but so many precious moments from those nights are gone forever. Numberless conversations, breathless laughing fits. Declarations, revelations, confidences. They’ve all fallen into the sofa cushions of time. I remember only that we always sat up half the night, cataloging the past, mapping out the future. I remember we took turns describing what our little company was, and what it might be, and what it must never be. How I wish, on just one of those nights, I’d had a tape recorder. Or kept a journal, as I did on my trip around the world.
For the story of GreenMellen, while I didn’t record much along the way we were fortunate to be in a slightly later era than Phil so we have the benefit of technology that saved a few things for us.
For example, in the early days of GreenMellen, Ali and I used Google Chat quite a bit and so many of those text conversations are still in my email archives. For example, here’s a snippet from September 21, 2009, just a few days after we started the company:
It’s nothing shocking, but it’s fun to see our communication from way back then. In the years since, I’ve tried to do a better job of grabbing little snapshots in time. Here are some of us in 2019 when we were doing some volunteer work:
Or here is a funny outtake from a social media photo we were trying to capture:
Technology today makes it easier, and this is just a reminder (to myself as much as anyone) to take a second and record a few meaningless moments today, because the meaning will grow into something big as the years go by.
