The ROI of Staying Human

Why the startup myth almost stopped me from writing

For most of my adult life, I believed in the garage.

Not literally, of course. Garages clearly exist. I’ve seen them. Some of them even contain rakes and boxes of Christmas decorations.

No, I believed in the myth.

Somewhere out there—right now—was a guy in a garage building the next billion-dollar company.

Jobs and Wozniak.

Gates.

Zuckerberg.

Pick your flavor of hoodie-wearing tech messiah.

The story always had the same moral: one brilliant idea plus a little grit equals a billion-dollar company. If you were smart and ambitious, you should probably be chasing that idea.

Rags to riches.

The American way.

So I did.

For years I chased systems, businesses, scalable ideas. I read books about entrepreneurship. I studied processes. I read Fortune, Tony Robbins, and every motivational and business process book I could get my sweaty little palms on. (I miss bookstores in the mall, don’t you?)

I tried to reverse engineer the formula that turned someone with a laptop and a dream into someone ringing the opening bell on Wall Street. And for a long time I thought I was being practical.

Because there was another thing I wanted to do. I wanted to write.

And writing, from a purely capitalist perspective, is a terrible investment.

Let’s do the math.

A novel can take hundreds of hours to write. Maybe thousands. Then you revise it, edit it, publish it, and market it. If you’re lucky—really lucky—you might sell a few thousand copies. If lightning strikes, maybe more.

But the odds of becoming a New York Times bestseller are roughly comparable to getting struck by lightning while holding a winning lottery ticket. From a strict return-on-investment perspective, writing fiction makes about as much sense as opening a lemonade stand in Antarctica. (Trust me on this; I made the data model in Excel.)

So my very practical, very capitalist brain made a decision.

Writing could wait.

The real work—the serious work—the capitalist work—was finding the garage idea. The startup. The scalable system. The thing that could turn into a company.

Now here’s the funny part.

During all this time, I was actually writing.

Not as much as I should have been, but enough that something interesting started to happen.

A little show called The Harry Strange Radio Drama began to take root.

One episode at a time.

It found listeners and built an audience.

People began writing to tell me they enjoyed the stories. Some even told me the show helped them get through long drives or rough days. One listener from Ukraine wrote to tell me he was practicing his English by listening to Harry Strange. I always wondered how he explained the word “toots” to his wife. But I digress.

If you’re a storyteller and someone tells you your story helped them get through the day… well, that’s about the nicest compliment you can receive.

And yet—even while that was happening—I kept looking for the garage.

Because the mythology runs deep.

Part of my brain kept whispering: Yes, this writing thing is nice… but where’s the real opportunity? Where was the scalable idea? Where was the startup?

Where was the thing that could turn into the mythical exit event where I suddenly become one of those people on a podcast talking about “my journey as a founder”?

The strange thing about myths is that you don’t realize you believe them until they start shaping your decisions.

Looking back now, I can see how that myth quietly influenced years of my life.

Writing was something I loved. But it didn’t pass the ROI test. And it didn’t look impressive on a spreadsheet.

So for a long time I treated it like a hobby. Something I did after the “real work” was finished.

Except here’s the truth I eventually stumbled into.

The myth was wrong.

Not just a little wrong.

Fundamentally wrong.

Because it assumes that every meaningful human activity must justify itself through money. That the value of something is measured by its market price. That if an activity cannot produce growth—exponential or otherwise—it probably isn’t worth your time.

That logic works pretty well for venture capital.

It works terribly for art.

Art has never obeyed the rules of scale.

Shakespeare didn’t have a product roadmap. Van Gogh didn’t optimize his brush strokes to maximize quarterly paint returns. Most of the books that shaped human civilization were written by people who never saw a dime from them.

And yet those works endure.

Because the real return on art was never financial.

The real return is something harder to measure.

It keeps you human.

Writing stories forces you to imagine other lives. You spend time inside the heads of characters who are nothing like you and somehow exactly like you at the same time. You wrestle with questions that don’t have neat answers.

You try to say something true about the world—even if that truth is wrapped in monsters, detectives, or strange folks named Harry… or Gareth… or Scarlett.

In other words, you stay connected to the messy, complicated, irrational thing that makes us human in the first place.

And that’s not something you can easily chart on a balance sheet.

These days I still appreciate a good garage story. Entrepreneurship can be a wonderful thing. Building companies creates jobs and moves the world forward. And I will never part with my iPhone.

But I no longer measure my creative life using startup math.

Because the older I get, the clearer something becomes. Not everyone is meant to build the next unicorn company. But almost everyone has the capacity to make something.

A story.

A song.

A painting.

A strange little audio drama about a supernatural detective wandering around Trail’s End.

Most of those creations will never make their creators rich. They won’t lead to venture capital rounds or IPOs. They won’t get covered by Bloomberg or TechCrunch.

But they do something just as important.

They remind us that not everything valuable in life needs to scale.

Some things only need to exist.

So these days, when the old capitalist voice in my head asks the familiar question—

What’s the return on investment?

The writer in me finally has an answer.

You stay human.

~Tony

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