Associating success with difficulty level

"You're not building a "real product", therefore, I do not respect you. You're just a content creator. Stop pretending that you're a "real founder"."

The quote above is from the Starter Story newsletter. Although I’m not as hateful (or as confrontational) as the person who wrote that comment, I do catch myself thinking similar thoughts. I have to do something difficult in order to achieve 'true' success. SpaceX is a more impressive company than, say, Zoom.

As Pat, the Starter Story guy, points out, from an entrepreneur’s mindset, this is a pretty limiting belief. You should actually try to play on easy mode, not hard mode. Find a place where you have some kind of unfair edge, or better yet, something extremely easy that nobody else had thought of.

But still…

A while back I was catching up with a friend. He is very smart, charismatic, driven, and an original thinker. He doesn’t care much about conventional success. He charts his own path. And at the moment, he is launching a yoga and meditation community. I can’t help but wish he would do something more interesting (yes, of course I’m projecting my own interests). I’ve also been enjoying the excellent writing by

Paul Millerd

, about charting your own path, the pathless path. Paul became a writer after starting his career in consulting at McKinsey.

He is a very talented and experienced writer and I enjoy following his path. One thing I like about him is the clarity and honesty about the path being a work in progress. I also consider myself to have been on the pathless path since 2016 or so. But his message so far, as I read it, boils down to: quit the ratrace, care less about money, find something you love doing for its own sake and do that. In his case, what that ‘something’ is, turns out to be writing about purpose. A kind of meta-commentary on life (just like this post). I’m happy for him, but I also just can’t help but feel conflicted about that.

What does that say about me? It’s complicated actually. A mix of envy and a ertain amount of distaste I guess. I envy the sense of purpose and peace these ‘writer guys’ find in helping others through writing, but I also wish they’d make themselves more useful. I get why writing is nice: There is no better way to crystallise thoughts. It provides quick feedback. It’s rewarding for it's own sake to see an argument take shape with clarity. It's comfortable, you can do it from anywhere, it doesn't make you hungry or cold. But it is a very passive thing to do. Surely you might influence people and make their lives better, even significantly so. But it’s not going to make healthcare or roads better, speed up the energy transition, or make travel more affordable.

I like to write, but I don’t want to be a ‘writer’. I’ve lived on Bali doing very little but surf, travel, eat, and read for 2 years. It was fun but also mind numbingly boring and unrewarding. Most importantly, having written almost every day for the last 6 years, I have rarely felt truly accomplished afterwards. After all, all I did was combine a bunch of words.

“Talk doesn’t cook rice” — Confucius

Actions speak louder than words

What I told my yoga studio friend was that if everyone would become a content creator, coach or spend most of their time meditating and traveling, the world would become a much worse place.

The consumer spending power to pay for that lifestyle, the airplanes to fly to Tulum, the roads, bridges, broadband internet, hospitals, health insurance, all of it is created by people who actually work. As highly educated, privileged, able bodied, sound minded members of society, don’t we have some kind responsibility to create things that are actually productive?

Simple, grounded purposes are underrated nowadays. You don’t have to find a purpose in some kind of spiritual sense. Making healthcare more affordable or building a better tool for, say, e-signatures are very worthy purposes.

What then does this mean for purpose

To be clear, I’m not judgemental enough that my respect for others depends on the difficulty or usefulness of their work. I’m also not trying to gatekeep ‘being a founder’. This is more about my own search for meaning than about the others.

Envy and respect

The people that write about purpose, or get paid to just post random stories from their life, are in some ways living my dream. They get paid to write train-of-thought stuff without much research underpinning it. Of course I also secretly wish people paid me to write useless train-of-thought stuff like this from a picturesque bar overlooking the ocean. They also have great secondary employment conditions, like work from anywhere, answer to no-one.

It’s also definitely not writing in itself that feels hollow or easy to me. If I think about publications like

Lenny Rachitsky

or

Noah Smith

, and I simply can’t fathom becoming that good at running a newsletter. Their pieces are so dense with information and so awesome in their clarity, as well as high effort in terms of research. It’s the same with Starter Story as well. These are, the way I see it, very purposeful newsletters. They contrast with the purpose seeking newsletters.

Distaste with navelgazing, or being jaded

So I think then, my doubts about writing stuff like this are rooted in my personal disdain for the Beatnik/Hippie ‘searching for yourself’ movement. In my lifelong search for purpose I too have dabbled in meditation retreats, psychedelics, journaling, and lots of thinking. Consistently I’ve found there is just not much there (not nothing, but not enough to dwell on for any significant amount of time). And yet, this has become a sizeable industry sucking in talented people like my good friend the yoga guy.

In the meantime, I’m reflecting on the role that public writing has in my own life, hence this Substack and this fairly ironic post about purpose which argues that writing posts about purpose is not very useful. Nothing is better than writing in helping me get clarity on my own thoughts. But although I do want to write stuff like this here too every now and then, my goal is to keep the share of these existential musings fairly low and focus mostly on useful, applicable ‘what’ and ‘how’ playbooks for life and work.