Not nearly as big as a Facebook IPO, our company, 3 Tier Logic, will be publicly traded starting November 10. I’m about to make a big change in my own life and I have no idea how it will play out.

Although this is an exciting experience, I can’t help but feel obligated to say this isn’t a measure of success. Quite the opposite. There are so many people who get excited when they get “funding”, and for good reason. But after being in the tech scene for a while now, I know narcissism runs plenty. There couldn’t be a more important moment to think back say, “I came from a humble place. It was humility that got me here today.”

I can remember a time when I was infatuated with my ideas and my growing expertise. This was back in the days of when I was working on a fledgling startup named Rubik. The startup scene in Vancouver was building momentum and there were plenty of press articles to support the idea that entrepreneurism was hip and cool. In the end I left Rubik. I’d personally call it a fizzling failure on my own accord.

It was after Rubik when I got my real shellacking. Left trying to start up my next idea, I was my own personal humbler. There was a point when I started sleeping out of our shared office space since I couldn’t afford a place to stay. And then I finally approached Rob Craig at 3 Tier Logic when I was ready to give it up and move on. And now we have this month’s big events to take us forward.

But if you think I am talking like I am “rags to riches”, the point here is we are nowhere near that yet. And there’s still a good possibility we can still fail. So when I’m excited to tell friends, family, and others about our big news, you can take it with a grain of salt. The only thing we’ve accomplished is support from the investment community. For all I know, we could be under even more scrutiny as a public company than before. And if we encounter hardship, it takes a lot of confidence and a cool head to pull yourself back together.

So what really defines success? I’d personally call it sustainability. If/when 3 Tier Logic can outlast multiple years of hardship and put ourselves in the black and continue to create value, then that’s a true success. There are companies out there - whether crooked (Enron) or questionably unsustainable (Groupon) - who may have gotten all of the public attention in the beginning. Are they truly successful? An engineer who worked for Motorola once told me that his company leadership once defined value as “increasing shareholder liquidity”. That same manager is probably not at Motorola today.

The only thing left to do is be humble. And I’ve heard that term misused a lot. So many people think humility is about being nice to other people. Well that’s part of it - you can still be nice and be a total idiot. Being humble is understanding that at any point your own well-being can be challenged. An individual is not important if they’re so vulnerable. Parading that you’re a success, and you’re doing all these great things for people…blah blah blah. You can still end up dead in a freak accident, get a nasty lawsuit, or in our case have a potential share price PLUNGE and cascade into total brand failure. I’ve learned that humility is having enough confidence to keep yourself in-check. Because if you don’t, then you start entering your own bubble and you stop paying attention to the things that matter. And that’s when life will catch up to you.

Life success isn’t a climax, it’s a sustainable system. And if you take a look at individuals who are always trying to reach a higher climax - Jordan Belfort, Robert Allan Stanford, Bernie Madoff - they hit failure harder. Those may be financial business examples, but often enough technologists don’t have the criminal penalties to bring them the negative press. Instead they often fizzle up and die. I’m not sure whether failing slowly is more attractive than a big sudden crash. Either way if you’re not humble, you won’t prevent either.