This chapter contains a lot of philosophy and background on how I think about business and life. It may or may not be useful for you.
I am writing this from a remote village in Southern India, relaxed, planning my year ahead in peace. I make enough money to fulfil all my desires. I have a beautiful and caring wife who I want to share my whole life with, and I probably bought most of the things I wanted 10 years ago. I am not worried about tomorrow or about 10 years from today. I do not go to meetings stressed out about the outcome, and I do not talk to investors worried about whether they will invest. In fact, I turn down a lot of investor meetings when I do not see a fit. When I think about it, it is not because I have no problems. As an entrepreneur I take risks every day, things go wrong every day, I make mistakes every day. Then I realised the reason was something else. I found my light. This may seem boring, but I think it is important to this book.
As strange as it sounds, the idea for this note came to me in a dream. Every day I meet people who have been there and done that, and people who are struggling. There are people who have found their light and people who have not. The good news is that there is no playbook for life, so you are free to make your own. The bad news is that there is no playbook for how to get there.
I spend a lot of time thinking about what worked for me and what did not. I try to be objective and data driven whenever I can, but when I look back, all I ever really did was never stop believing.
When I was young I never had any idea who I wanted to be when I grew up. I always wondered how other kids had a definitive answer. I finished school and went to college and still had no idea what to do. Somewhere along the way I realised I loved computers and built a business around it, and looking back it was so obvious. That is why Steve Jobs famously said you cannot connect the dots in your life looking forward, you can only connect them looking backward.
I had a friend in school who always said he would be doing business when he grew up. He did. A few people figure it out early, and we meet them and wonder how they did it. But there are far more people who seem to have it figured out and do not have a clue what they are doing. The problem is that most people try to live by a timeline set by society and the people around them. You are born, you go to school, you go to college, you get a job, you get married, you have kids, you move to the US or get “settled,” you grow old and you die. You meet people who are going by the timeline and you have no idea what to do about it. Here is a secret. Life does not have a timeline. It is never too late.
It will take you a while to realise that your life is not defined by someone else’s timeline, and that is a journey of its own. Once you understand you are not bound by someone else’s timeline or definition for your life, you are already in a better place. Now all you have to figure out is what works for you. In my opinion, you cannot truly experience the peak of happiness unless you have truly experienced the valley of despair. For me the valley of despair was every door closing in front of me, waking up not knowing what I would do that day, seriously contemplating suicide, and feeling like the world had ended. Do you know how to fight that? One day at a time. It adds up to weeks, months, and years before you know it.
We never truly understand the power of compounding. How did Warren Buffett build so much wealth? The power of compounding. He kept going and amassed most of his wealth after 50, and even more after 60. Every choice you made in your past compounded into what you have today. Every choice you make from today decides where you will be. Do you know the single best thing you can do to lose weight? It is not getting the best trainer in the city, or lifting 100 kilos, or anything like that. It is showing up at a gym, every single day. Do it for 365 days and tell me you are still the same. Sometimes small things have a huge impact on your life. All you really have to be is someone with the fortitude to relentlessly stick around for the long game. I remember my early days in programming. I showed up every day to learn more. For hundreds of days I showed up on Stack Overflow and talked to people. Sometimes I answered, sometimes I listened, sometimes I just watched. The most important thing was that I showed up every day. The second order effect was meeting people from Google who played a big role in my life later on.
Finding your light
Finding your light is a lot of things coming together over many years, and sometimes decades. If you are reading this for a shortcut to apply tomorrow and get results the day after, you are in for a disappointment. But if you are willing to put in the work, with enough courage, patience, and perseverance, then maybe this can help.
I have met people who worry about life every day but never take any action. Actions change your life. Simple, conscious choices can help you find your light. The first step is finding what you want to do for the long term, and the only way to do something for the long term is to enjoy it. How do you find it? Try everything. There is no shortcut here. Do as many jobs as you can. Learn as many things as you can. Break it into chunks of two or three months and spend time on different things. Love engineering? Make something. Love art? Draw something. Keep doing more and more until you figure it out. You will know it when it is the one. It is the same way you find the love of your life.
Figuring it out is only the first step. I had a friend who was an artist. He figured out early that he was good with music, instruments, and a bunch of other art forms. Then he picked up something else that he was only sort of good at, and more importantly his family liked it and it was a respectable profession, and he settled for even less. He never ended up an artist. It is not too late for him, but he let his life be controlled by others, by their timeline and their ambitions, and he is living someone else’s life. You have a dream? You have to protect it, fight for it, live for it, and make it real. No one else is going to do it for you. It is easy to be misunderstood for a long time, and that is okay. You have to get comfortable being misunderstood. When I got my first job, I was paid less than all my friends. Deep inside I knew I was meant to do something big, but I had no clue how. When I started my first business, it was in a small room near my house. I had no connections, no money, nothing. You have to believe in yourself before anyone else does. Protect your dream.
Taking risks that change your life
Humans are scared their whole lives. We have no idea how we got here, who is around us, or where we are going. It is okay to be scared. Like any fear, you can only overcome it by facing it. You cannot discover new horizons until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore. I have left jobs without lining up a new one. I have shut down businesses without knowing what to do next. I was scared every single time, but I did it anyway. It led to more confidence, more discovery, and each time I became braver and took bigger risks, which led to even bigger opportunities. You want to start a business but you are stuck in a job you do not love? Quit today. You will figure it out. There is probably never a right time, and if you wait for the right time it never comes. It can be your 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, or 70s. It can be any age. Look at successful entrepreneurs and you will easily find people who started late and still made it. Colonel Sanders founded KFC at the age of 65, and you are telling me it is too late for you?
It is not just about starting a business. It could be a risky but high rewarding job. It could be a leap of faith into something you do not know. Our CTO worked at a big multinational for almost a decade before he quit and joined me in what was then a two person startup. Many people get stuck in a corporate job because they think it is safe, only to learn that in a recession the company does not care about individuals, no matter how important they think they are. Remember when Twitter fired its CEO and COO along with 75% of its staff in a matter of days. I am sure many of them were important to the company, but not anymore.
A better strategy is to believe in yourself and your abilities. A bird sitting on a branch trusts its own ability to fly, not the branch’s ability to hold it. Our CTO trusts his ability as a developer more than anything else. Build your skills over the years so you can trust your own wings, and when you are ready, take the leap, go into the unknown, and trust yourself to win.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make is thinking about doing it without ever doing it. I have seen people who want to start a business. They brainstorm ideas, turn them over and over, and eventually decide there is too much risk in that particular one. They never actually did anything. You know how you start a business? Make something you think people want and sell it for money. If they buy it, make more. If they do not, figure out why and move on. Do not run the whole business in your head without ever doing it. It is okay to be scared, it is okay to be wrong, it is okay to make mistakes. Most of this seems simple, and it is.
That brings us to the second mistake. Holding on to things that are not meant for you. You start a business and it is not making money. You love it because it is your baby, you have spent years on it, and still nothing. You keep adding years onto it for nothing. The tricky part is that no one can really tell you when to keep going and when to give up. You have to use your best judgement. Making a decision is more important than being right or wrong about it. Whenever I am in doubt, I make a decision based on my best judgement with the information I have, because what is worse is not deciding at all and regretting it later. Letting go of what is not meant for you is an important part of moving forward.
Desires and money
At the start of this I said I make enough money to fulfil all my desires. That is not the whole story, and anyone can do it. I made it possible by doing two things. One is making enough money. The more important second one is limiting the things I want. We humans have an insatiable urge for more. We are hungry to explore more, make more, see more, do more. In a way, human progress can be credited to this never ending urge to have more and never settle. We wander, we explore, we push past borders and past the limits of what we thought was possible. No other animal is as ambitious as we are. Desire and ambition are our biggest blessing and our biggest curse. At some point you have to make conscious decisions about what you want. It is okay to desire something, but wanting everything only leads to unhappiness. More often than you think, you walk to work and want a bike, then you get the bike and want a car, then a sports car, and it never ends. It is okay to want a sports car or an expensive watch or anything else. The key is to not want everything in the world. That leads to unhappiness and a never ending cycle that will destroy you.
A good rule of thumb is to make a list of the things you want to do, buy, and have for yourself. Some of the things I do these days are things I wanted ten years ago. There was an interesting exercise during my time at Draper University in Silicon Valley. You write down 100 things you want to do in your life. No particular order, anything and everything, and while doing it you will find that at some point you struggle to fill in all 100. A very interesting activity to try yourself sometime.
Always remember, it is okay to want something, but it is not okay to want everything.
Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation
In business, one of the worst mistakes you can make is tracking the wrong metrics. You can be a very meticulous person, but if you track the wrong things you will not get very far. In the same way, it is hard to find your real motivation. There are two types. Intrinsic and extrinsic. One feeds your soul, the other feeds your ego. Intrinsic motivation is what drives you when no one is watching. Love engineering? You make and break things all the time. Are you learning engineering for a certificate, or to graduate from a big college? That is the wrong reason to be an engineer. Most people I know who are truly into something are not doing it for recognition. They are doing it to satisfy their soul’s curiosity, for the joy of building, for the joy of creating.
I recently met a man. He is a surfer, a cook, an errand boy, and a boxing trainer. He does any job that pays him a little, and he travels all over the country. He does not have much money, and he is not worried about it. When I met him he was on his way to Kashmir from the southern state of Kerala. He did not have enough money to travel all that way, so what he does is work in Kochi for a while, make some money, go to Bangalore or Goa, work whatever jobs he can find to make enough for the next train, and repeat until he reaches Kashmir, maybe a couple of months later. He is doing what he loves and satisfying his soul, and he does not care what the world thinks of him. He does what is right for him. Some people, the ones society calls misfits, the square pegs in round holes, are sometimes living the life everyone else only dreams about.
So you have decided to do something about it. Now come timing and your fit with the idea.
I recently met an entrepreneur who had been working on a product for four years. It was one of the most perfectly timed products in the market, and yet he made no money. He ran out of investor money and had to let his whole team go. Timing of a product or idea or business often plays a huge role. I have been there myself, where my ideas were ahead of their time by years, even decades, and it happens more often than you think. I have seen people build things long before the market was ready. It is a common problem for visionaries. But what I want to talk about more is the fit between an idea and the person building it. Like the entrepreneur I just mentioned, the idea was right and the timing was right, but it still did not work, because some people execute an idea far better than others. You have to have founder-idea fit.
Spend the time to figure out what works for you. As you find the things you love, you will likely find many of them. A good rule of thumb is to pick the intersection of something you love to do, something that adds value to someone else, and something that makes you money. More often than not this leads to happiness, because you love what you are doing, it is even better because you make someone else’s life better, and the best part is that it makes you money.
Mindset is everything
One of the most underrated factors in success is your mindset. Recently I went surfing with a friend and started learning how to surf. Oh boy, what a lesson in life. The mindset of a surfer. When a surfer gets on a wave, he is ecstatic. He enjoys the ride even though he knows the wave will end soon, or might even crash on him. He enjoys the wave knowing there is always another one coming. That is a very important lesson for surfing the waves of life.
Let me tell you about a time I met someone creating his own luck. I was taking an early Uber to the airport in Delhi. Near the end of the ride, the driver handed me a 20 rupee note and asked me to give it back to him at the end of the trip as a tip. This was his first ride of the morning, and he wanted to start the day on a good note with a happy tip.
For a moment I was skeptical about the logic, but then I realised it was a good thing. You can wait your whole life for things to go your way, or you can go ahead and create your own luck. He is in control of his destiny, and I love him for that. At some point you have to stop blaming others for what happened in your life and go build a life for yourself. You alone are responsible. Your mindset is everything.
A good idea, while you are fixing your mindset, is to be around people who are where you want to be. People you admire. They say you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. There are often false signals here, but there are clearly people who have been there and done that. One thing that allowed me to change and prosper was the freedom to grow apart and lose touch with people. It is hard to change yourself if you are stuck in the same social orbit. There is a gravitational force that pulls you back into the same circular pattern over and over. Breaking out of it takes tremendous force.
Dealing with sadness and despair
While you fix everything else in your life, everyone has their own personal shit to deal with. You will too. There will be problems. There will be people you have to deal with. There will be sadness, despair, and everything in between. Some of it is small, some of it is huge, like losing someone. The way you deal with severe sadness and despair is pretty much the same in every case.
You will find that it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you are drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating near you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find a piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it is something physical. Maybe it is a happy memory or a photograph. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive.
In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and do not even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe days, maybe weeks, maybe months, you find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash over you and wipe you out.
But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what will trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything, and the wave comes crashing. But in between the waves, there is life.
Somewhere down the line, and it is different for everybody, you find the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary or a birthday. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will come out the other side again. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you will come out.
The waves never stop coming, and somehow you do not really want them to. But you learn that you will survive them. And other waves will come. And you will survive those too.
“Sadness gives depth. Happiness gives height. Sadness gives roots. Happiness gives branches. Happiness is like a tree going into the sky, and sadness is like the roots going down into the womb of the earth. Both are needed, and the higher a tree goes, the deeper it goes, simultaneously. The bigger the tree, the bigger will be its roots. In fact, it is always in proportion. That’s its balance.”
― Osho, Everyday Osho: 365 Daily Meditations for the Here and Now
The end
I am not a self help guru and this is not a self help book. Subject all your beliefs to radical doubt, so that you can build a bedrock belief and rebuild your cognitive life on firm principles. You will fail a lot in the process, but understand that failure is only as relevant as the insight you draw from it.
Appreciate what you have. There are people praying for the things you take for granted. No one can make you happy except you.