Attitude Builds Reality
At nineteen, I found myself in the unglamorous trenches of customer support for AllDorm.com, a company I had started with a few friends as sophomores in college that positioned itself as the college everything superstore… the Amazon for college students just as Amazon was becoming a giant in e-commerce. My job was orchestrating the symphony of e-commerce fulfillment, negotiating vendor agreements, and spending eight hours a day fielding calls and emails from mostly anxious mothers who weren’t happy about one thing or another; Shipping delays, missing items, orders that didn’t arrive before move-in day, products that weren’t what their kid wanted or expected.
What I learned in such a position, and what still shapes how I approach business and life, is that most people only reach out when something breaks. In such a role one becomes intimately familiar with the full spectrum of human personality types. There are those who understand that treating others with grace makes everything easier, and those who seem determined to export their own anxiety, frustration, and fear onto everyone they encounter.
I didn’t know it then, but that education would prove invaluable decades later when I bootstrapped MARK37 from my own limited savings, pouring ridiculous hours and pure faith into building something most people still didn’t understand they needed.
During the early days of the business, a customer reached out expressing frustration that her Ghost Phone took four days to ship and irritated that GrapheneOS was so different from her iPhone. Her email escalated into a full rant about how we were failing to deliver the frictionless experience necessary to convert people away from Big Tech devices.
Part of me wanted to respond in kind. I was living on fumes and faith, acutely aware that we were competing against companies with trillions in invested capital, decades of brand loyalty, and an entire culture that had already embraced the surveillance state as normal and Amazon’s “everything on-demand” mindset.
The injustice and lack of understanding in her response felt personal.
Another part of me recognized something true beneath her frustration though: She was right.
If we’re going to help people escape surveillance capitalism at scale, the transition should be nearly frictionless. Her anxiety wasn’t really about our timeline or the GrapheneOS interface, but with a reality where no one had solved this problem elegantly yet. I actually shared and still share the same anxiety she did.
I took a breath, said a prayer, and responded with as much patience and empathy as I could muster. I apologized. I explained our constraints honestly and tactfully… yet her response remained rude and inflammatory.
I learned yet again that sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you can’t make everyone happy. That’s not a failure. That’s reality.
What matters most, however, is your attitude in those moments. How you choose to show up when you are frustrated, or when someone else is frustrated, absolutely affects the reality you’re building around yourself. Not magically. Literally.
Every interaction shapes your personal and family relationships, your business culture, your customer relationships, your team’s morale and your own spiritual state.
Technology frustrates everyone. Even those of us with more than ten thousand hours of experience working and living it daily!
I calculated recently that I’ve spent the equivalent of an entire month of my life troubleshooting printer problems. It’s absurd. Technology evolves constantly, things break unpredictably, and staying current is exhausting... on multiple levels.
When you think about it for half a second you realize most of life operates this way. Not just technology.
The reality is, despite our consistent growth, we are still a relatively small team, not paying ourselves anywhere near what we would be making if we worked for large established companies, laboring to make ends meet every month, trusting God has a plan for us that makes sense through the long days and sleepless nights.
With this in mind, I want to thank everyone who approaches support conversations, whether they’re reaching out to us or to anyone around them, with empathy, grace, and the understanding that we’re all learning and supporting one another through this complicated journey we call life.
Know that your attitude in moments of frustration isn’t just kindness, it’s how we help build the reality we actually want to live in.
Even more gratitude goes out to those of you who send us unsolicited notes of encouragement and thanks. They truly provide us with the fuel we need on days when nothing seems to be going the way it should.
In the end, the technology we at MARK37 are most interested in building, and the people we are most interested in supporting along this journey, through the highs and the lows, are those who grasp the Golden Rule and reality that we’re all in this together… for the greater Glory of God.