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The Technology

Note: This is the talk I gave at Startup School Europe, which was held last Saturday in London.

You've heard a lot of great startup advice today. This is going to be a little different.

I often advise startups that it's better to seek deep appeal, to create something that a few people love, even if most people don't get it right away. In that spirit, I've decided to share the technology and dreams that matter to me, with the hope that it will be very appealing to the right person. This is, after all, a business defined by outliers. Someone in this room is going to create something very important. That's the person I'm hoping to reach.

We talk a lot about technology, and its ability to transform and improve the world. But technology is more than just transistors and algorithms. Those are just patterns on silicon. The technology that really drives the world are the patterns in your head. Those are the patterns that give rise to the patterns in silicon, the patterns in our society, and our whole concept of reality. Change those patterns, and you change your world. Maybe not overnight, but like steering the rudder on a great ship, a small change now makes a big difference later.

We often sweat life's big decisions, but it's the little decisions that matter the most -- the ones we make thousands of times a day, often without even realizing it. The big decisions are the inevitable result of those small decisions. They steered the ship into port, created the conditions that gave rise to the situation. And then perhaps we feel that our hand has been forced, the big decision must be made, but really it was made by the thousands of small decisions leading up to it.

We all know the power of defaults. This is about my defaults, the things I keep top of mind and return to when I'm stuck, confused, or doubtful. It's an effort to tune and improve my patterns, my technology.

First, I don't know anything. That's a warning. If you take this all on my authority, then you're missing the point. You must own your own programming.

It's also the first pattern.

If I believe that I already know the answer and possess the truth, then I'm not genuinely open to learning larger truths.

This is the danger of experience. We already know better, we already know that an idea or business won't work. This is one reason that naive, young founders are often the ones who start the most successful companies -- they just don't know any better, and they're often too arrogant to listen to those who do.

I don't want to downplay the value of experience. This whole event is about sharing and learning from the experiences of others. But don't be limited by our experiences. Just because it didn't work in the past doesn't mean it won't work in the future. Likewise, what worked before may not work again.

This is especially important for startup founders. The best opportunities live in our collective blind spots. To most, they appear to be bad ideas, or simply unimportant. If everyone could see the opportunity, someone else would have already taken it.

In 1997, Larry and Sergey tried to sell Google for a million dollars. Fortunately, they were unable to find a buyer. The conventional wisdom of the time was that search was neither important, nor valuable.

Of course experience isn't the only danger. Dogma and ideology are even worse. They provide us with the answers, and put boundaries around our thinking. Ignoring the dogma invites ridicule, or even punishment. I suspect that's why more ideological societies are less innovative. If we aren't free to wander outside the realms of conventional thinking, then we won't happen upon the opportunities that others have missed.

Escaping dogma is hard. From the inside, it simply looks like truth and reality. Watch out for any belief that limits the range of your thinking and exploration. This includes logic and reason. They are useful tools, but just as often work to keep us trapped inside of exclusionary belief systems. If you believe yourself to be a rational person, then you're in the trap.

To be innovative in our work, we need to evade the limitations of established thinking.

Which brings me to the second pattern: Kill all daemon processes.

For those of you who aren't familiar with operating system internals, daemons are computer programs that run in the background performing various services, often invisible to the user. Sometimes they get out of control and start consuming all of the machine's memory, processor, or other computing resources. This is one reason why your computer or phone often works better after a reboot.

I like using this as an analogy for the same kinds of loops that operate in our brains, like when a song gets stuck in your head. The more insidious loops are the voices of doubt, anger, and self-loathing that infect our minds. Often they are the internalized voices of our parents, peers, the media, or just random people on the Internet. Other times, they pose as our own voice, possibly one that has been there for as long as we can remember. Either way, these loops are often parasitic and limiting. Anytime we take a risk or move in a new direction, they are there to doubt and criticize us. Anytime we seek to escape dogma, they are there to ridicule and condemn us.

Creating an innovative new product often means spending years working on something that most people doubt the value of. It's hard to do that with a head full of noise, voices telling us that we're being foolish and should just cut our losses.

Before we launched Gmail, many people inside of Google thought that the whole project should be scrapped. One notable executive predicted that we would never even get to a million users. We can't let those voices drag us down.

In order to grow, be free, and reclaim our mental resources, it helps to clear out these voices. It's simple, yet very difficult, because they'll keep coming back. But with practice, we get better.

Right now, stop, observe your breath, and enjoy a moment of stillness in your mind. The voices that keep interrupting the silence are the runaway processes. Keep dismissing them until there aren't any left.

Our days are full of spare moments. Instead of filling them with Flappy Bird or Facebook, take the opportunity to find a calm and clear mind. Even if you don't always succeed, it's the practice that matters. Walking in nature also helps.

The voices will resist of course. Continuing to assert their own importance is one way they survive.

My response: Yes, and thank you. That's the third pattern.

Life rarely goes the way we want it to. When we're taking risks and trying something new, we should expect that it often won't work out the way we had planned. And even if we try to keep our lives narrow and risk free, things still won't work out the way we had planned. We can get angry and frustrated and stuck, or we can accept and move forward, assuming that whatever happened is somehow for the best.

I've found that this is a great predictor of success among startups. They all face setbacks, but some are able to take those setbacks and use them to their advantage. Others just keep slamming their head against the same wall, never making any real progress. Uber has been rather masterful at this. Here in London, they turned the taxi strike into a huge growth opportunity for themselves.

In my own life, I've observed that many of the best things are rooted in some of the worst events, and that I would not have one without the other. But this about the small decisions more than the big ones. Every day is full of setbacks and disappointments, but I do my best to say, "Yes, and thank you", accepting it as a gift, however improbable that may seem at the time. This pattern has an almost magical way of transforming reality and maintaining the forward flow of life.

The ability to accept a greater range of outcomes opens the door to pattern number four: Choose the more interesting path.

People often ask how I decide which startups to invest in. There's no simple answer, but this is a big part of it.

When I heard about Justin.tv in early 2007, my first response was to laugh and ask if they were serious. They said yes, so I offered to invest. The plan at the time was for Justin Kan to attach a camera to his head and stream it live on the Internet, 24/7. It seemed a little insane, but I was very curious to find out what would happen. I've found that that kind of interestingness is a very useful signal.

The immediate answer to, "What would happen?", was a lot of people trolling Justin. Next they added the ability for anyone to stream their lives. Most of it was boring, or possibly illegal, but one thing really caught on: video game streaming. Eventually they changed their name to Twitch.tv to focus exclusively on competitive gaming. They are now one of the most valuable properties on the Internet. Their average daily viewer watches over 100 minutes per day, and they are the 4th largest source of US Internet traffic after Netflix, Google, and Apple.

I had no idea that would happen. I mainly invested because it sounded like an interesting experiment, and the founders seemed to genuinely believe that they were on to something.

Interestingness is a sign of unexplored or under-explored territory. If I already know what the outcome is going to be, that's not very interesting. If it's completely random, like gambling, that's also not interesting. But I find that great startups exist in a space of productive uncertainty. Regardless whether they succeed or fail, I'm likely to learn something interesting.

That was my logic when joining Google in 1999. I expected that they would likely get squashed by the much larger Alta Vista, but the people were really smart, so I believed that I could learn a lot in the process.

In fact, I can guarantee success by simply redefining success to include learning something interesting. In this way, I've always succeeded, and also learned a lot :)

If your startup has only one definition of success, then you're setting yourself up for failure.

It's tragic how many people are sacrificing their lives on some startup that they don't really care about, in pursuit of some external success they'll likely never achieve. Personally, I think it's a mistake.

Which leads me to pattern number five: Love what you do.

It's often said that you should "Do what you love", but that's mostly bad advice. It encourages people to grind away their lives in pursuit of some mostly unattainable goal, such as being a movie star or a billionaire startup founder. And even if they do make it, often the reality is nothing like they imagined it would be, so they're still unhappy.

Do what you love is in the future. Love what you do is right now. As with the other patterns, it's meant to guide the small decisions that we make every moment of every day. It's less about changing what you do, and more about changing how you do it.

One of the problems with having a goal-oriented, extrinsic mindset is that it treats the time between now and task completion as an annoying obstacle to be endured. If you're doing something that is difficult, uncertain, and takes a long time, such as building a new product or company, and you have that mindset, then you're likely gambling away a big chunk of your life. Subconsciously, you may also compensate by choosing smaller, more realistic goals, and that's unfortunate. Plus, it's unpleasant.

When I was working long hours at Google, it wasn't because they were whipping us to work harder. I would have quit. I was doing it because I genuinely love building things. It wasn't all fun of course, but I typically enjoyed at least 80% of my day.

"Do what you love" treats "what you love" as a fixed thing, but it's not. I used to hate running. I would sometimes force myself to run a few miles because it's supposed to be healthy, but I never liked it. Then I read a book that said we are born to run, and that it can be fun. Inspired, I decided to try running just for fun, focus on the quality of every step, and forget about the goal completion aspect of it. Very quickly, I learned to enjoy running, and over time I've transformed my entire relationship with fitness and exercise to be oriented more toward enjoyment.

Naturally, this more intrinsic approach ultimately improves the quality of our efforts, which generally leads to greater extrinsic rewards as well. Intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation are best when they are both pointed in the same direction.

Real work always seems to involve a certain amount of unpleasant, grinding effort though, and startups often have a lot of it. It's like having a baby. It's 5% cute, adorable moments, and 95% dirty diapers and vomit.

The key to loving these more unpleasant moments is meaning. If we genuinely care about and believe in our mission, then those difficult times begin to take on a more heroic quality.

Although it's critical for a startup to have very immediate and actionable plans, such as write code and talk to users, I believe it's also important to maintain a meaningful and inspiring vision.

The sixth, and final pattern for today is one that I borrowed from Google: Maintain a healthy disregard for the impossible.

I think Larry Page learned this as a kid at summer camp, and to me it represents the true innovative spirit of the company. Now that Google is huge and many have grown cynical about the company, it's easy to dismiss such things. But I remember when it was a tiny startup that nobody had heard of, and I had to explain to people that it was like Yahoo minus all of the features other than search. People would just give me this sad look that seemed to say, "I'm sorry you can't get a real job".

But inside the company there were these absurdly ambitious ideas that made it feel like we were going to take over the world. It was an exciting place to be.

Larry wanted to store and search the whole web in memory, even though our machines only had 1/4 GB of RAM. It was unrealistic at the time, but Moore's law moves fast and very soon we were doing it, but only because everyone's thinking was already oriented in that direction.

He also wanted self-driving cars that would deliver hamburgers. That hasn't happened yet, but I bet it will.

For me, potentially impossible goals are much more inspiring than realistic ones. I'd rather fail at something awesome, than succeed at something inconsequential.

As with many of the other patterns, this one is about continually shedding the limitations of outdated thinking.

When I decided to write the Gmail interface in Javascript, pretty much everyone who knew anything about Javascript or web browsers told me that it was a bad idea. It had been tried in the past, and always ended in disaster. But times change fast, and fortunately I was in an environment where doing impossible things was not just permitted, but encouraged. After we launched, the impossible quickly became the new normal, completely changing how we think about web apps. That's fun.

For me, startups are more than just a clever way to make money. They are machines for harnessing the fire of human self-interest, creating a self-sustaining reaction capable of rapidly transforming the world. Self-interest is often treated as if it were dirty or wrong, but NASA didn't get to the moon by vilifying gravity.

It's often assumed that business is all about money, but to me that's like saying that rockets are all about rocket fuel. On some level it's true. You won't even make it off the launch pad without fuel. But that myopic view misses out on the larger purpose and mission of the machine. Certainly some businesses really are about nothing more than making money, but among the truly significant founders I've known, there's always a larger purpose. It's not just a nihilistic pursuit of rocket fuel.

Before I finish, I want to mention my impossible goal.

We now, for the first time ever, have the technology and resources necessary to make the world a great place for everyone. We can provide adequate food, housing, education, and healthcare for everyone, using only a fraction of our labor and resources. This means that we can put an end to wage-slavery. I don't have to work. I choose to work. And I believe that everyone deserves the same freedom I have. If done right, it's also economically superior, meaning that we will all have more wealth.

We often talk about how brilliant or visionary Steve Jobs was, but there are probably millions of people just as brilliant as he was. The difference is that they likely didn't grow up with great parents, amazing teachers, and an environment where innovation was the norm. Also they didn't live down the street from Steve Wozniak.

Economically, we don't need more jobs. We need more Steve Jobs. When we set everyone free, we enable the outliers everywhere. The result will be an unprecedented boom in human creativity and ingenuity.

And now the impossible part. First we have to learn how to get along with each other, and with ourselves.

I'm looking for full-stack hackers. People who understand that technology is more than just patterns in silicon. The same patterns and systems of patterns exist everywhere. Capitalism is a technology. Like the internal combustion engine, it's tremendously valuable and transformative, but it's not beyond improvement. The same goes for government, religion, and everything else. We have an incredible future ahead of us, but we won't get there by clinging to obsolete patterns.

As founders, we must start small, and work with the grain of what is. The path is never obvious, and innovation happens in the most unexpected ways. The personal computer was originally dismissed as a toy. If you think Instagram is just a collection of photo filters, you're missing the big picture. Maybe photo sharing won't lead directly to world peace, but helping people to see the world through the eyes of others looks like a step in the right direction to me. And they grew to over 200 million users in less than four years. That's larger than most countries. That's the power of a startup.

As Richard Feynman said, "The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to." Don't be discouraged by people who dismiss your efforts as trivial just because you aren't curing cancer or traveling to Mars. The patterns I've presented today are about developing an independent mind, unburdened by the limitations of other people's thinking. Then you can judge for yourself what is worthwhile, and move forward with the conviction necessary to do something great. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.


Thank you.

Help me distribute $100,000 to new entrepreneurs in Africa

I love the idea of microlending, small loans of a few hundred dollars made to entrepreneurs in impoverished areas so that they can start or grow businesses of their own, helping them to achieve financial independence. The unfortunate reality though is that many microlending programs charge surprisingly high interest rates, pushing entrepreneurs deeper into debt. This is because early microlending sites such as Kiva outsource loan management to local banks, which charge interest rates that average 35%, and go as high as 88%! I would be uncomfortable charging those rates to wealthy Americans, but asking poor people in Africa to pay that makes me feel like some kind of third-world loan shark.

That's why I'm excited to have Zidisha as one of our most recent Y Combinator funded non-profit organizations. Zidisha uses modern technology and a global network of volunteers to enable direct person-to-person lending, cutting out the middle-man and bringing loan overhead down to a more affordable 5% interest rate. Just as Airbnb connects travelers directly to hosts, Zidisha connects lenders directly to borrowers, providing not only an affordable loan, but also a personal connection, so that people are able to exchange progress updates, photos, and more. I'm a big believer in the idea that personal connections across economic and cultural divides can go a long way towards uniting all people in peace and prosperity. It's one of the big reasons that I've invested in AirBnb, Watsi (our first non-profit startup), and now Zidisha.

Zidisha is already changing lives and transforming communities. Here's a photo of Pherister Ndoge, who used a loan from Zidisha to help expand and improve her school in Kenya.

But Zidisha is still relatively new, and although they now have a record number of fundraising entrepreneurs, most people have never heard of them. We need your help raising awareness, so I've offered to donate $10 for every tweet, retweet, or Facebook share linking to Zidisha and using the #zidisha hashtag, up to a total of $100,000. That $10 goes towards funding the entrepreneur of your choice, and all of the loan repayments will be donated towards continuing to grow the Zidisha platform.

Here's how to help:

Go to Zidisha and choose an entrepreneur you think deserves support, click on the entrepreneur's photo to open their profile page, then click on the Zidisha campaign banner at the top of the profile page to share the profile URL via Facebook or Twitter.

OR

Simply tweet: Help send $100,000 to new entrepreneurs in Africa with @ZidishaInc. $10 donated for every tweet or RT: http://bit.ly/1jMsV3P #zidisha

OR

View our post on Facebook, then click the "Share" link.


You should also check out the Zidisha website and read the inspiring story of why Julia Kurnia founded Zidisha.


Join the discussion on Hack News.

The Gift

It's often said that you should live every day as though it's your last. That always seemed a little impractical to me. But when my brother died, I felt like I had missed my chance. Life could never be the same again. Part of me was already dead. I had always understood death intellectually, but now I felt it at a visceral level, and that's completely different. Death was inside of me now. 

Steve was 33 when he died, and I was 27. Statistically, there does not appear to be much of a genetic component to pancreatic cancer, but still, I worried. How much longer do I have? Could there be a tumor growing inside of me at this very moment? 

These doubts led to an interesting question. What would I do if I had only six year left to live? 

You can live a lot in six years, but you can just as easily waste six years doing things that don't really matter. I wanted to make the most of whatever time I had left. At first I thought that meant pursuing some audacious goal, like curing cancer, but over time I learned that it simply meant being mindful of how I'm living my life. The question evolved. It may not be six years. I could die at any moment.

Is this how I want to spend the rest of my life?

The answers can be surprising. Cleaning the kitchen is relaxing, and it creates a pleasant and healthy space for my family and friends to gather. Not a bad way to live. But sitting in a windowless conference room while people I don't really love debate things that I don't really care about? No, that's not how I want to spend my life. Of course others may find meaning in that. It's very much a personal decision.

Death strips away everything that doesn't matter. It's incredibly painful, but it also brings a kind of clarity. People matter. Everything else is noise. Several months after Steve died, we made a big life decision. It was time to have kids. 

The pregnancy went smoothly. My wife, April, seemed so happy that she glowed. I was almost envious of her. She was experiencing a kind of closeness that I never could. We were taking the opportunity to go on a couple of final vacations before the baby arrived. Then, around midnight, she started to bleed. We were in a small town in northern New Mexico. We went to the local hospital, then waited while they called for a doctor to come in (there weren't any there that night). The doctor immediately saw that she was in labor, and said that if there was any chance of saving the baby, my wife would need to be airlifted to Albuquerque.

The doctor also remarked that I seemed unusually calm. I didn't bother to tell him that I was still processing my brother's death, and that this seemed relatively small in comparison. I had never met the baby. April didn't even look that pregnant. I was a little surprised to hear that survival was even a possibility.

There was no room for me on the helicopter, so I had to drive several hours through the night, alone, not having any idea what I would find when I arrived at the hospital.

The nurses took me in to see the baby. There she was, 1 pound and 10 ounces, on a ventilator, her eyelids still fused, born 100 days early. But I felt her energy. She was a little ball of fire. The attachment came on like I never could have imagined.

The doctors said it was still too early to know if she would survive or not. Every time we saw her, and every time we left, we knew that it may very well be the last time we ever see our daughter alive. I never knew what it meant to live every day as though it's my last, but suddenly I was living every day as though it might be her last.

I finally understood the meaning of unconditional love. This little person couldn't even breathe on her own. She may not survive the day. The future was more terrifying than hopeful. All we had was now. All we could do was to love her, and to expect nothing in return.

A few days after she was born, the doctors did a head ultrasound to make sure everything was ok. The results were not what we had hoped for. There was bleeding in her brain. The doctors said that if she survived, she would most likely be disabled. The next week I noticed a disturbing trend in her charts -- her head was growing too fast. The bleeding in her head caused hydrocephalus, an accumulation of fluid in the brain. She would need brain surgery. 

The following months were the most terrifying ride I have ever experienced. The complications kept having complications. First she had to be flown to San Francisco, because there are no pediatric neurosurgeons in New Mexico. Then she had surgery. Then more surgery. Eventually she came off the ventilator. Then she got meningitis and stopped breathing. Then more surgery.

The hole was deeper than I ever could have imagined. Sometimes, the fear and darkness were unbearable. It felt like death would have been easier. It was all I could do to breathe. Inhale. Exhale. Repeat. The future was too terrifying to imagine. The past was a reminder of all that I had lost, a life of hope and joy. But most moments, on their own, were ok. I could sit in the hospital and hold my baby. I could appreciate every moment with her. I could love her unconditionally. We were together, for now, and we were both breathing. 

Eventually she was well enough to go home. The first year was very difficult, but in time she grew strong, and today she is a healthy, beautiful, and fiery seven year old girl. Every day, her presence is a reminder of what truly matters.

In every tragedy, there is a gift, if we are able to see and accept it. From my brother, I received a personal understanding of death, and a constant reminder to live my life as though it may end at any moment. From my daughter, I learned what it means to love unconditionally, without expecting anything in return, a true gift.

These gifts were delivered at great cost, but still I often struggle to retain them. Life gets busy, and I forget what matters. But the reminders are all around us, if only we can open our eyes.

When our lives are smashed to bits, and it feels like the ground has disappeared from under us, we look for guidance, for our North Star, for a light that can provide meaning and direction to what remains of our life.

For me, this light lies in unconditional love. This is something that I wish to remember not only at an intellectual level, but at a more visceral level as well. I want to feel truth.

So I made a simple story, a fable. Stories are powerful because they engage our imagination, bringing abstract concepts to life inside of us. This one uses the familiar characters of God and the Devil, but you needn't believe in anything supernatural to understand it.

Long ago, the Devil boasted that he could easily gather more followers than God. God's way of gathering followers was simple: give everyone Unconditional Love and Forgiveness, nothing more and nothing less. Naturally the Devil was more devious. He knew that most people would not knowingly follow the Devil, so his plan was to lie and claim that he was the One True God, promise his followers a great reward in the afterlife, and threaten that those who didn't worship him would be sent to hell when they died. God was betting on Love, but the Devil believed that Greed and Fear are stronger than Love, and therefore even good people could be tricked into following him.

The God of Unconditional Love and Forgiveness brings union through love. The false Gods bring division through fear and greed. If a God promises to reward you with 72 virgins in paradise in exchange for flying an airplane into a building, it's a false God (or a false image of God, if you prefer). If a God threatens to send you to hell for loving the wrong person, it's a false God. If a God tells you to coerce people into worshiping him, it's a false God. If a God promises protection in exchange for doing his bidding, it's a false God.

Genuine, unconditional love is a gift that must be freely given and freely accepted, with nothing expected in return. Love can not be delivered at gun point, or with the threat of eternal damnation.

In this winter of fear, suffering, and division, the God of Unconditional Love gives comfort and direction. His spirit is reborn in our hearts when we give the gift of unconditional love and forgiveness to others and, most urgently, to ourselves.

Eight years today

The car in front of me kept hesitating. The driver couldn't seem to decide where to turn. Up ahead I could see that the light was green, but that I wasn't going to make it through in time because this car was in my way. I started to feel slightly agitated, but reminded myself to simply accept the current situation. I can't even see the other timelines, maybe this one is somehow better. It's a practice that I had started while my daughter was in the hospital. Accept. Accept. Accept. Slow drivers are a rather minor stress relative to a having a baby that may not survive, but the practice is remarkably similar. And the key to practice is repetition, every day, every moment. Traffic provides me with plenty of opportunities to practice. 

Finally she turned in to the parking lot at Trader Joe's and I proceeded to the light, which was now red. It soon turned green, I crossed El Camino, and then stopped for the passing train, which was immediately in front of me. After it passed, I saw his body on the ground just to the other side of the tracks. I saw other things there too, but I'll spare you the details. I tried calling 911, but I got a recorded message saying that they were busy. Obviously I wasn't the only one calling. The police soon arrived, and directed us to turn down a side street, away from the scene. 

I then turned left on Waverley St, and slowly drove past my brother's old apartment, pausing to remember all that had transpired there. But my mind was still preoccupied with what I had just seen, and it didn't even register what day it is today. 

The winter of 2004 felt so cold and rainy, the coldest I can remember it ever being here in California. The cold had a kind of depth that you can't quite escape. But on March 9th it was sunny and starting to get a little warm. Winter was over, and my brother had just died that morning. We left the hospital and returned to his apartment in Menlo Park. It felt so wrong. He was gone, but his belongings were still there. Eventually we would have to pack them all into boxes, keeping some for ourselves, and donating the rest. It does not feel good to pack up the remains of your brother's life.

It had only been three months since he found out. We had dinner Sunday night at a Chinese restaurant in Mountain View. Afterwards, he was feeling a little nauseous and went home early. After a few days of not being able to keep any food down, he went to the doctor. He had an intestinal blockage. Caused by a tumor. Pancreatic cancer. The very bad kind. It eats you alive, and in his case, it also blocked his own food supply. Although his death was rather quick, it was also very slow. Three months of torture, but I'll spare you the details. He was only 33 years old. Steve was a very good person. He did not deserve that. Nobody does.

After the funeral, I returned to work. Sometimes, it's wonderful to be able to focus my mind on something simple, something I can control, like computers. A few weeks later we launched Gmail. Later that summer Google had its IPO. Life is unfair. Very unfair.

Eventually my parents finished packing up Steve's apartment and drove back home to New York. I didn't even begin to understand what they had gone through until the following year, when my daughter was born 100 days early. There were many complications, and it often seemed like she wouldn't make it, but I'll spare you the details. The pain is worse than you can imagine. It's worse than I can now imagine. Luckily she survived and is doing well. She has the strongest spirit of anyone I've ever met.

And that brings me back to today, March 9th, 2012. Eight years since Steve died. I keep looking for meaning, but all I've found so far is that in order to be at peace with the present, we must be at peace with the past, because the present is a product of the past. Accept. Accept. Accept. Learn to love the present moment. What happened, happened. It's difficult to understand the big picture when our lives are mere brush strokes on the canvas of reality. Trusting that it all fits together to form something beautiful is the purest form of faith. Anything else is a dangerous distraction. No contracts with God, no expectations of reward, just trust.

On a more practical level, what matters most in our day-to-day lives is that we're good to ourselves and to each other. It's actually not possible to only do one or the other -- we must do both or neither, but that's a topic for another time. Sometimes, when I write about startups or other interests of mine, I worry that perhaps I'm communicating the wrong priorities. Investing money, creating new products, and all the other things we do are wonderful games and can be a lot of fun, but it's important to remember that it's all just a game. What's most important is that we are good too each other, and ourselves. If we "win", but have failed to do that, then we have lost. Winning is nothing. This doesn't mean that we can't push ourselves or stretch our own limits. Those things can be very healthy, but only when done for their own sake. Ultimately, the people who learn to love what they do who will be the ones who accomplish the most anyway. Those who push only for the sake of some future reward, or to avoid failure, very often burn out, sometimes tragically. Please don't do that.

Please be good to each other, and your self.

I am nothing

On a scale of one to ten, how good of a cog are you? How well do you function in your assigned role? How much of a man or woman are you? How do you rate yourself as a son or daughter, father or mother, wife or husband, heterosexual or homosexual, liberal or conservative, black or white, winner or loser, shark or sheep, introvert or extrovert, Christian, Muslim, atheist? How smart are you? How rational? How emotional? Do people like you? Are you getting ahead, or falling behind?

How do you know? Are you keeping an eye on the others in your category, comparing to see how you measure up to your peers? Is it more important for a man to be tall, or to have good hair?

This is, of course, the path of insanity, and not the good kind of insanity.

What will you do if you're too tough to be a good woman, too sensitive to be a good man, too selfish to be a good husband, too lazy to be a good employee, too shy to be a good friend, too caring to be rational, too fat to be pretty, too effeminate to be straight, too introverted to be a good leader, too smart to be kind, too young to be taken seriously, too old to make a difference, or too far behind to even get in the race?

These are all false standards and false dichotomies, but they are so common and so ingrained that we sometimes believe in them without even realizing it. And this leads to a mountain of insecurities, because nobody measures up to these crazy standards (and nobody should). But even if we don't believe in these things, it still matters what other people think, right? What will the neighbors think? Or how about our co-workers, or the people at church? And so everyone works to hide their insecurities, and they look around at their peers for comparison, and maybe they feel bad because everyone else seems to have it easy, to have it all figured out. The truth is, nobody can see the truth anymore. They are all working to hide the truth, because the truth is that they are afraid of who or what they really are. So they all put on a show, and they pretend to be a good whatever. Or maybe they rebel, and make a point of being a bad whatever, but then they are still under the control of that false standard, and they are still not being themselves.

That is all so exhausting. 

I am nothing. It's simple. If I were smart, I might be afraid of looking stupid. If I were successful, I might be afraid of failure. If I were a man, I might be afraid of being weak. If I were a Christian, I might be afraid of losing faith. If I were an atheist, I might be afraid of believing. If I were rational, I might be afraid of my emotions. If I were introverted, I might be afraid of meeting new people. If I were respectable, I might be afraid of looking foolish. If I were an expert, I might be afraid of being wrong.

But I am nothing, and so I am finally free to be myself.

This isn't license to stagnate. Change is inevitable. Change is part of who we are, but if we aren't changing for the better, then we are just slowly decaying. 

By returning to zero expectations, by accepting that I am nothing, it is easier to see the truth. Fear, jealousy, insecurity, unfairness, embarrassment -- these feelings cloud our ability to see what is. The truth is often threatening, and once our defenses are up, it's difficult to be completely honest with anyone, even ourselves. But when I am nothing, when I have no image or identity or ego to protect, I can begin to see and accept things as they really are. That is the beginning of positive change, because we can not change what we do not accept and do not understand. But with understanding, we can finally see the difference between fixing problems, and hiding them, the difference between genuine improvement, and faking it. We discover that many of our weaknesses are actually strengths once we learn how to use them, and that our greatest gifts are often buried beneath our greatest insecurities.

Letting go of your identity can be difficult and takes time, possibly forever, but as with any change, moving in the right direction is all that really matters (which is why you shouldn't compare yourself with others -- you didn't start in the same place or with the same challenges). Fortunately, we have a variety of emotions that can help us: pride, anger, fear, jealousy, insecurity, unfairness, embarrassment, bitterness, etc. These are sometimes portrayed as bad emotions, but there's no such thing as a bad emotion, just bad responses to emotions. (For example, torturing children is a very harmful response to fears about your own sexuality) If we instead use these emotions as a cue to remember, "I am nothing", let go of our identity, and examine why we are feeling the emotion (typically because something has threatened our identity) then these emotions are actually beneficial. They point us towards the buried truth.

True self improvement requires becoming a better version of our selves, not a lesser version of someone else. But without self acceptance and understanding, how can we even know what that looks like or whether we're headed in the right direction? It would be like putting the final touches on the Mona Lisa while picturing some celebrity you saw on the cover of People magazine -- the result would be a mess. Until we let go of our mental images of who we are or who we should be, our vision remains clouded by expectation. But when we let go of everything, open ourselves to any truth, and see the world without fear or judgement, then we are finally able to begin the process of peeling off the shell of false identity that prevents our true self from growing and shining in to the world. And it starts with nothing.