Deep beneath fracking’s endless headlines—some good, some bad—lies a business fraught with risk and resilience, greed and grace…and unrelenting madness.

The problems, the missteps, the abysmal timing, the pitiful, stumbling overreach—none were recent developments. All were part of an early onset failure, all wired into my DNA from the start. The symptom—that was my fledgling frac company. But the cause, the reason? That was all me. I’ll make a hurried, overly zealous decision to do something, and then just do it. I’ll assume that if I do, I’ll land on my feet. The bedrock of all my assumptions has always been Why shouldn’t I land on my feet?

Why though? Why so damned cavalier?

Entrepreneurialism is to blame. It’s because I’m an entrepreneur.

I have an entrepreneurial restlessness that overwhelms common sense and other well-regarded human instincts like fear and fear of failure. Reasonable personality traits like caution and restraint are pushed out of the way. There just isn’t enough air in the room. Entrepreneurism consumes it all, sucking up every bit of energy, riding roughshod over benevolence, dignity, good and proper manners, and everything else living under the umbrella of civility.

I’m not necessarily proud of it, either. I’ve worked on overcoming it. I’ve prayed for restraint, for anything that might suppress it. But it’s always there, irrepressible, agitating against authority, seeking difficulty over ease, naivety over season.

It’s the same for all of us. The damned bullheadedness that marks all entrepreneurs—our cacophonous, messy catchall of a group that, by all reasonable standards, is a shit-poor group to belong to.

Dan Doyle studied English writing and geology at the University of Pittsburgh. After graduating, he started an oil and gas production company, raising money and drilling in Northwest Pennsylvania’s ancient oil fields. Restless for something bigger, Doyle moved the company to Coleman County, Texas, and drilled until a prolonged downturn forced him out. He ended up at New York University’s graduate film school, making a movie there that played at Sundance. After a decade of kicking around in the movie business, growing weary of distracted producers, he started a grip and lighting rental business in Pittsburgh. That company became the seed for Reliance Well Services, his frac company. What started with three trucks grew to two hundred. Doyle currently runs that business alongside another start-up (Arena, in 2023) that is drilling for oil in the storied Powder River Basin of Eastern Wyoming.