“I don’t consider myself an inventor,” says Max Markgraf. “I used to like the word maker, but that’s not right either. I want to consider myself a creator.” For Max, it’s transformation, not modification that represents creation. He’s looking for the space between what existed before and what isn’t yet a reality, but should be. He found that space for the first time in high school. And he called it Stallion Wear.
Max, a sophomore at the time, looked around at his peers and noticed something. Sure, people wore shirts, but were they funny? Max decided they weren’t. He needed to do something about that.
He learned screen printing and had an artistic friend draw up some sketches. His favorite? A muffin holding a barbell, captioned “Stud Muffin”.
Soon, Stallion Wear received orders from clubs and teams in and around the school. Local community organizations needing team t-shirts called him up. No one in his family was particularly surprised by this. He asked his mom for help getting started. His mom, Max says, used to tell people, “He was making deals at three years old.”
Every year, Max worked to improve his process, so much so that when he was in college his dad introduced him to a man who had recently opened a storefront screen printing business on a much larger scale than Max’s high school operation. Max became a minor stakeholder which meant he now had overhead. His partner had more business experience, but Max had extensive screen printing know-how. But, t-shirts aren’t free.
Both Max and his partner wanted to help the community, but they couldn’t keep producing t-shirts at the cost his partner wanted to charge. Max, not yet twenty-one, let his partner know things had to change if they wanted to stay in business. When they couldn’t reach an agreement, Max left and the business folded within a year. Like eating a balanced diet, Max learned an entrepreneur needs more than just one or two things to seed a successful endeavor. It’s all things in harmony that make the difference. “I always want to keep optimizing,” Max says. “See what’s good and make it better.”
Always Be Optimizing
Screen printing had run its course for Max, but he took the lessons he’d learned with him. To Max, an essential question is: Why are we doing this? Finding the purpose behind the action helps him distill several possible options into a simple decision: go forward or stop. If the reason behind the action fills a gap, meets an unmet need, and drives progress forward–it’s a go. Otherwise, stop. The equation seems basic. But is it?
In the funny t-shirt business, and particularly for a young man, the question of purpose need be only as complex as why not do it or because it’s fun. For Max the adult, the reason behind why he does what he does has gained nuance.
“I’m going to start a company. But not yet.” Max is looking for the connection. He’s looking for the message that says: Yes. This thing I need to do. He’s not looking to fill a local market gap, as he did with Stallion Wear. He wants something more.
Max looks around at bigger problems. He thinks about the pain points we experience as we live in the world that someone like him could solve. Someone who decided one day to use his 3-D printer to print parts for a CNC machine and assemble it. Someone who’s always tinkering and finding the intersection between what is, and what could be if we only had enough imagination to see it.
Tinkering Towards Tomorrow
Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From, writes extensively about people like Max. “The trick,” Johnson writes, ”to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.” Max tinkers in order to add to his repertoire on how to build stuff. He doesn’t look at the demise of his screen printing storefront as an end-point, but rather as a beginning. The best way to educate yourself in creating is to fail. “Being right,” says Johnson, “keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.”
Max started his own business, then became a partner in a larger enterprise. Then left that enterprise because he couldn’t see the future in it. He wasn’t leaving because he got bored or he wanted to chase girls and drink beer. He left because their visions didn’t align. Though the decision to part ways may have been the right one for Max, the business ultimately failed. Hard feelings on both sides make the memory bittersweet. Max took what he learned about partnerships, process, business, marketing, pricing, and more, and dissected it. Adding each new insight to his list of lessons learned. “I’m the guy in the weeds,” he says of himself, “nitpicking the problems to get to the next thing.”
What’s Next?
Whether flipping houses, building machines, or designing prototypes of useful little tools like a portable sleeve for attaching a full-size bluetooth-connected mouse to a laptop, Max adds to his collection of skills. Whatever he’s doing, he’s not wasting time. Each experience is a lesson, each failure a success. Every moment is an opportunity to find that one thing.
“This meaningless thing,” Max says of the thing that others pass by, “that’s what I’m looking for.”
And when he finds it, look out–he just might change the world.
If Max can do it, so can I. So can you.
Be awesome in real life.
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Originally Published on You are Awesome
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ID: 244656496