I started on my pursuit of pain to avoid another. I, like many kids, grew up in a world where home was hell and outside an escape. But by escaping, I learned something magical. If I spent more time studying at school, life got better. I learned the quintessential lesson of human development and civilization. The idea symbolized by the sacrifice of Isaac or squirrels hiding nuts. Deferred gratification, the pursuit of pain.
And baby, I deferred.
I remember sitting in the car, one snowy night in Scranton, Pennsylvania, heaters on full blast, thawing out my hair I’d forgotten to dry after highschool swimming practice. I’d yet to do my homework, but first, I’d need to scamper to Model United Nations, only to surreptitiously sneak out midway to attend Mock Trial.
I didn’t really know what I was sacrificing for. I honestly mean that. Other kids knew about universities and the pivotal role prestige and pedigree play. And maybe I was blessed I didn’t. I had none of the pressure. I just had the silent sacrifice. An orphaned shaman doing ritual by rote, unaware of god or cause for which his offerings burnt. But burnt they were.
When I started SPG (StartPlaying), that blind deference to deferred gratification, that pursuit of pain, carried me through.
SPG was a “dumb idea”. I remember a friend cribbed about his YC rejection in a Facebook group (when people still used Facebook) by pointing out dumb companies YC funded. And guess which company he pointed out first? But despite COVID rocking the world, the nay saying of friends, and the uphill battle of raising for a D&D company, we ground on.
I have so many memories of that time. Fights with co-founders, almost getting sued out of existence, runway nearly running out, interns hired on shoestring budgets, incipient competitors that looked, oh, so fearsome. But I remember it all with this joie de vivre. As Atos might say, “Those bitter memories had time to turn to sweet ones.”
In the beginning, it was us versus the world, PvE. We were a crack team, navigating a jungle of jaguars, mosquitoes, and ant colonies with biomass 50 times our size. And we were winning. The problem was we had no idea how to deal with success.
Immediately after we raised from a16z, we made a catastrophic hire that almost killed the company. Our product velocity dropped to zero. We built processes on processes to fix the “problems” pointed out by our new hire.
And I felt pain.
There was this tension in the chest. Kind of like both of my pecs were pulling my shoulders to hunch. You’ve probably felt it? A little burn, where you imagine your heart might be. Faster, shallower breathing. Maybe it hits the back of your shoulders. Or the little furrow in between your brow.
And every time I went into a meeting with the catastrophic hire, I’d feel this pain. My whole life collapsed down into that feeling of anxiety and stress.
It was so simple in hindsight. My body was literally screaming, “You have to fire this person.” But I didn’t act on it.
I grew up in a world where hard problems were worth solving. And this seemed like a hard problem, one that I could solve with small adjustments to process or management style. With small pains. But I was wrong.
It took me longer than a year to make the right decision to let them go, to rebuild the company culture. To stop pursuing pain. People often say, “Well, at least you learned something.” But why do lessons need to be so painful? Why does pain equal growth?
Only later I started to see my foible. I pursued pain all this time instead of growth. I thought they were one and the same. That any painful experience, any scalding crucible, galvanized and made me stronger. But that’s untrue. If it doesn’t kill you, it doesn’t necessarily make you stronger.
Pain and growth are only correlated. Growth is change. And if there were no deterrent for change, our mind would be in constant flux, a maelstrom, turmoil. And so, we use pain, or at least that feeling, to ensure some constancy.
Much of my life, I pursued small pains, small deferments, small sacrifices. Sacrifice a party here, a drink there, a full night of sleep to succeed in the long run, to please my god of pain. But despite pursuing pain, I’d yet to grow.
I started to see that for the majority of my life, I avoided large changes.
When I was a kid, I fled from them. And like most trauma, it worked well at the moment. I didn’t have the power to affect the hell that was home. So, I used my patience and wisdom instead.
However, I did have the power to change SPG. And instead, I focused on small changes, small processes, the little ripples on top of a greater current.
But to fix SPG, I needed to cut deep.
I needed to change what I had done my entire life. Instead of running from growth, I needed to pursue it. I needed to fire a member of the executive team, cut the company in half, and admit the past year of work was a failure.
That really hurt.
Becoming the type of person that confronts your problems rather than running from them, killed a part of me. But living as I had done before, with that constant pain, a reminder of how SPG could have been, the physical sensation of megatons of cortisol being pumped into my central line, that’s what made the decision for me. The decision to change.
I understand why pain plus reflection equals growth. It’s because all growth is pain. To change yourself, to learn a lesson, to admit you are wrong, or worse, you are flawed, it hurts. Honestly, it hurts so much, I’d chosen to deal with the discordance between reality and my own world view rather than change.
But all life is suffering. Either you feel the dull pain of discordance for the rest of your life, or the sharp cauterization of change now. I hate to admit it, but I’ve never would’ve changed into the person I am today without months of my body and soul screaming at the top of their nosoceptic lungs. Without asking myself, do I want to live this way for the rest of my life?
I stopped running from growth, from change, and I started pursuing it.