In my first few years in college, I took a few gut courses that older friends assured me were easy, requiring only 4 hours of work a week. I did terrible in every one. The reason, of course, was that I hated those 4 hours and avoided the work whenever I could. After a couple of semesters of this, I just started taking courses that interested me. Instead of those random "gut" courses, I took various advanced computer science courses. They were easily three or four times as much work, but my GPA doubled. What I realized then is that my success was tied to passion. If my heart wasn't in something, I had a tough time pretending and putting in the hours.
When I first joined Goldman Sachs in 1999 as an intern, I had the chance to work on some really cool projects. We built an AJAX framework with client-side calls to ASP/COM objects before there was such a thing as AJAX and SOAP. My career there had its ups and downs in terms of the projects I was working on - there were other really cool ones and other duds - but one thing I quickly learned is that software is secondary at an investment bank. As Joel said, it sucks to be an in-house programmer. "As soon as your program gets good enough", he said, "you have to stop working on it. Once the core functionality is there, the main problem is solved, there is absolutely no return-on-investment, no business reason to make the software any better." This happened to me on more than one occasion, and I realized that I wasn't very good at building software that was good enough. It's hard to be passionate when you're building software that's "good enough".
If I was going to stay in a technical role, I had to rediscover my passion and I don't think it could happen in an environment like that. I also thought that I wouldn't necessarily be happy joining a law firm. While I'm immensely interested in the intellectual property and business law space, I couldn't see myself being happy with the kind of work that young associates do. Down the road, I could certainly see myself getting into the space representing and advising technical startups, but I decided I needed to go down the entrepreneurship path myself first.
It's been a long time coming, but Friday was my last day at Goldman. I am now working on Notches full-time - and the best part about it is that I won't have to stop when it's "good enough".