It is 10:47 p.m. The children are finally asleep. The house has settled into that rare, fragile silence that parents learn not to disturb. Somewhere upstairs, a clothes washer is filling or draining, downstairs a dishwasher hums. A phone lights up on the counter, offering another notification, another problem, another small piece of the world demanding attention.
And here I am, working in the bathtub.
Not because I have nowhere else to work. Because this is the one place where the door closes, the water runs hot, and for a little while, nobody needs anything from me.
My tablet rests on my bath board. Beside it, a notebook is beginning to curl at the edges from the steam. There are sketches, calculations, a list of suppliers, and three versions of an idea I thought was brilliant this morning. By tomorrow, I may hate all three. Entrepreneurship.
I used to work in tech and engineering. I understood systems, specifications, design constraints, and the peculiar satisfaction of solving a problem that other people couldn’t. I knew how to take an idea apart, understand its moving pieces, and make something work.
Then the world changed.
Suddenly, the work itself seemed to be losing its value. Years of human learning, experimentation, writing, designing, and creating were being swept into machines that could reproduce the appearance of that work in seconds. AI could eat my output, copy my patterns, and throw up something close (or even better) back into the world for free.
And everyone wanted to know how we were going to feed it, fight it, or keep up with it.
I found myself asking a different question.
What if I stopped competing to produce more data and return to making hard goods?
Things you could touch. Things with weight. Things that had to be designed, cut, assembled, finished, packaged, and carried into somebody’s home. Things that couldn’t be experienced simply by reading a clever description or generating another image of what they might look like.
I wanted to make something real.
So I started building a business around hard service goods. Simple and functional designs, made with care, intended to become part of somebody’s ordinary life. The sort of product that doesn’t need to announce itself every five minutes to justify its existence.
Making a tangible product doesn’t make the risk any smaller - just different.
The materials cost money before the customer arrives. Packaging has to work. Suppliers have to deliver. The price has to make sense to somebody who has never met you. Every decision carries a consequence, and every mistake comes with an invoice. There is no salary waiting at the end of the month. No manager to absorb the uncertainty. No safety net that magically appears. Only tightrope.
I think about cash flow, production, distribution, and whether the next idea is the one that moves everything forward or simply another expensive lesson. I think about my children down the hall. I think about my brother, digging beside me, a way through this same difficult landscape. We share a dream that is bigger than a business plan, and more personal than revenue targets.
We want to find our way back there.
It is the place where time used to feel wider. Where afternoons disappear in sunshine. Our parents sit outside and watch the light change on the water as our children build core memories of a youth similar to our own - no subscriptions, few screens, only paper calendars that only change with conversations over a phone or in person. Where people have their children’s birthday parties in the backyard with photos of you and all your lifelong childhood friends.
We want more of that.
More time with our parents while we still have it. More time with our children while they still want to spend it with us. More time together as a brother and sister, building something that might eventually give us back the very thing we seem to be spending to build it.
That is the peculiar bargain of starting a business. You sacrifice time today in the hope of reclaiming some tomorrow. You give up certainty to create a possibility. You work late so that, one day, perhaps, you won’t have to.
And then the bathwater begins to cool.
I notice it first around my shoulders. The steam has thinned, and the room is no longer quite so warm. I look down at my notebook, at the half-finished plan, at the idea that still needs a better name, a price that wholesale can swallow in this retail economy, a new production vendor…everything is a decision. That’s all it is. Personal Risk vs. Better Decisions.
The cooling water reminds me of the day in front of me. Not the day I imagine waiting at the end of this business. Not the summers at the lake that I keep promising myself we will have more time to enjoy. Every day demands something new. A new idea. A difficult decision. A weighted plan that accounts for what might go wrong. An executed release, even when the work isn’t perfect and the outcome isn’t guaranteed.
Perhaps that’s why we came back to making things.
Not because the physical world is easier. It isn’t. Not because technology has nothing left to offer. It has plenty. But because I wanted to put my effort somewhere I could recognize it. Somewhere human intention could become something useful, something beautiful, something that would remain after the screen went dark.
I want my children to know that making a living can mean making something worth living with. I want them to understand that work can be creative without being abstract, ambitious without being endless, and successful without consuming every available hour.
I want my brother and me to build a way back to the lake. I want our parents to see us get there. I want our children to remember the sound of summer, waves on the shore, the smell of the greener trees after rain, and placid evenings where you can hear anything on the water.
The water is cool now.
I save the document, put a small mark beside the task that needs to happen first tomorrow, and close the tablet. There is still work to do. There will always be work to do. The tightrope will still be there in the morning.
But tonight, I have moved one thing forward.
I pull the plug and listen as the water begins to drain.
Tomorrow, there will be another idea. Another plan. Another chance to make something real.
And somewhere beyond the spreadsheets, the prototypes, the invoices, and the uncertainty, there is a lake waiting for us.
Not as a reward for working forever.
As a reminder of why we started.
