Felix Vallotton, The Library, 1915
Build the business you wanna run.
Duh. I know. This was a piece of advice I got from N earlier this week. Simple, straightforward, and sounds like common sense. Eat what you wanna see yourself eating, or act like the person you wanna be. So easy, yet so hard.
I wrote about how easily I could be affected by people around me. I surround myself with people who I think are recognized as successful and forget to think about my own definition of success. I followed these people, put my own dream away, and started chasing something I didn’t even want. Looking back, I found most of the mistakes extremely obvious. Most of these “mistakes" seems so basic, but somehow we just can’t get past them. I love this passage from Ask Polly on mistakes:
I sat there thinking about how often humans screw things up over the course of their adult lives. I thought about the countless things I’ve botched over the past decade: the dumb things I’ve said, the bad decisions I’ve made, the foolish emails I’ve sent, the short-sighted paths I’ve taken. In that moment, all of those blunders looked not just forgivable but inevitable. Suddenly it seemed obvious to me that all lives are just a series of absurdly poor choices, punctuated only occasionally by pragmatism or wisdom.
Most of the decisions we make are irrational. I fell in love with boys that hurt me the most (instead of the ones treating me the best); I deliberately “forget” things that are way too difficult to deal with (forget to pay bills, forget to send out packages, forget to have that one important talk with my family). And one recent mistake I made was to believe that happiness would derive from being like seemingly successful people (people with money and social status).
Nothing I did where the only reason for doing it was the money or status was ever worth it. I joined VC firms, thinking that I could get closer to successful capitalists. Well, I did learn something, but it was a horrible experience for me cause it sent me further from my destination. I tried raising venture money for my company with the goal of eliminating social inequalities, got roasted by the VCs, and changed my business model to doing B2B SaaS to serve enterprises, but hated what I did. I felt constantly drained.
I was not true to myself. I was building what people thought I should build, living a life they thought I should live.
The moment you feel that you are walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind than what exists in the inside, showing too much of yourself, that’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.
I heard this from a commencement speech Nei Gaiman made in 2012, and it stuck with me. I remember when I first started producing my podcast a year ago (I stopped it), it felt exactly like this. The podcast was called “How hard can it be, " collecting stories of people going through some hardship. Each one of them is going through a unique journey, but the process resonates with so many other people.
I shared my personal stories on the podcast. Sometimes I get so vulnerable I can barely listen to it afterward. But I remember how I felt in that period of time. I felt real, I felt close to me.
To live a happy life or to run a sustainable business, I need to make sure I’m true to myself, not by doing what makes sense to most people but by doing the thing that makes sense to me. The moment I feel myself in the work, that’s the moment I know I’m on the right track.
Proud of you!
Keep going, Vivian!
Love this piece and thanks for sharing your journey. I ask myself ‘am I proud of how I showed up today?’ And if the answer isn’t hell yes, then it’s time to realign. Keep going, Vivian!