Embrace the struggle.
You might just make sense of what in the world you are doing.
In one’s personal battles, sometimes a book is exactly what you need. For me, that book was The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz.
All of my heroes have one thing in common: They struggled. They experienced some insurmountable adversity and, thanks to that experience, they grew. They became great.
I recently added a new hero to my list. Ben Horowitz defines the struggle and has encouraged millions to embrace it through his book. Ben is now a hero of mine because, like many of my heroes, he could have just shared the good parts — how he sold his startup for nearly 2 billion dollars. In entrepreneurship, that’s usually all that you hear.
If Ben had made himself the main character of The Hard Thing About Hard Things, it would have been a success story. However, the main character in Ben’s book is the struggle. By focusing on the struggle, and spending time with the struggle, I was able to make a powerful, personal realization.
Everyone struggles. Life is struggle. The struggle is real. There is no avoiding it, so embrace it. As I’ve learned from my heroes, the struggle may just make you great.
My realization is that many of us have chosen our struggle. For various reasons we’ve decided to do one hard thing over another. Right now, I find myself in the struggle, and for a while, the why behind that eluded me.
Now, thanks to reading Ben’s book, I know exactly why I chose to struggle, and why it might just be the best thing for me.
My story was not like my heroes. I grew up in a quiet neighborhood in Marin County, one of the most privileged places on planet earth. My parents held great jobs and are still happily married, living in the same house I grew up in. My siblings are skilled and successful and we stay close. I was well liked in school and excelled in classes and sports. It was never a given that I would struggle, it wasn’t imposed on me.
But I was fascinated by the struggle. I looked up to skateboarders who would fall over and over before landing a trick. I became convinced that their failures gave them energy, or made them stronger, and I dove headfirst into action sports. I fell in with a new group of friends, and we raced around the neighborhood, building jumps and getting into all sorts of trouble. In action sports I found fear, pain, failure, and struggle all dressed up as a fun activity I did with my friends. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was taking my first steps away from comfort, and into the struggle.
I didn’t have to wait long to meet the struggle face to face. I had grown a lot through action sports, but I didn’t feel that I had realized that amazing potential that I had seen in my heroes. I had never gone far enough into the darkness to see the light.
The date was January 19th, 2014 and the 49ers(my hometown team) were playing in the NFC championship game. My friends and I were all watching when I got a call from my friend Sam. This was nothing out of the ordinary, but my stomach turned over immediately. Sam wouldn’t be calling me during the big game!? I knew something was amiss. I grabbed my jacket and ran to the back yard. It was cold.
A few words into the call and my fears were confirmed. Sam’s voice was hoarse and congested, as if he’d been crying. There was no need for small talk, my heart was pounding. I then witnessed what I consider to be one of the most courageous things I’ve ever encountered, as Sam broke the news that one of our best friends Cody, one of the kids that we biked around the neighborhood with, had passed away.
I suddenly found myself in the darkness. I collapsed into a hammock, incapable of much else. The game was turned off and my friends were around me. My phone wouldn’t stop ringing. I was very far from home with no one for miles who knew Cody like I did. With over a week of class and work to endure before the memorial, I felt very alone.
I was overcome with grief, but I began to feel something else as well. Some of that potential energy that I had seen in my heroes was beginning to manifest in myself. I asked all of our friends to send me photos of Cody, and dug through my hard drives for all the videos I had taken over the years. I sat down, and for the first time ever, I wrote a poem.
I embraced the struggle.
Those photos, my videos, and that poem became #LiveForCody. I premiered a short video at his memorial and launched a hashtag campaign that my friends and I still carry on to this day.
I consider this work to be the best I had ever done, and I learned what the struggle can do. Before, I was convinced that 4 years of business school and my eventual MBA is what it would take to actually make something meaningful. I had just found out that with a kick in the teeth and a spark of creativity, anyone can make meaningful change in the world.
This is what Ben means when he says, “It’s the moments where you feel most like hiding or dying that you can make the biggest difference as a CEO[…]to make it through the struggle without quitting.”
The hard thing about hard things is that there is no right answer. There’s no solution to the pain or sorrow that you feel, but there are actions that you can take. Ben believes that action is what separates the hero from the coward. They both feel fear, uncertainty, and doubt, but the hero takes action. People won’t remember how you felt, but they will remember what you did.
For me, adversity opened my eyes. Through #liveforcody I learned that I, just the way that I am, can create things. I learned that in a life of ease and comfort, I would never have been motivated to create. It was adversity that inspired action. I didn’t fully understand it at the time, but that life lesson fundamentaly shaped the next few years of my life.
I began to seek out the hard things. I felt that those hard things, if I were to try them, would create those same moments of greatness that I had just experienced.
That led me to Techstars, where I spent two years working 80 hour weeks with entrepreneurs from all over the world. No doubt I was back creating my best work. Most importantly, I wasn’t doing these hard things alone. I had an awesome community around me with whom I shared the highs and the lows.
I helped Techstars Boulder graduate three cohorts, and by my third demo day, the hard things weren’t so hard anymore. I noticed that for us, the hard work was over after Demo Day, but for the entrepreneurs in the program, the hard work was just beginning. With that realization, I had found my next hard thing. It was to join a startup in the Techstars class.
After a long journey, I was fortunate enough to join Hardbound.
This time around, thanks to Ben’s book, I know exactly why I joined. I want to make great things, and in states of comfort and ease, I won’t. Hardbound was a great thing that I could help make. My experience at Hardbound, like at any early stage startup, will be full of adversity and challenge. It will be these things that coax greatness out of myself and my team. Luckily, my team and I embrace the struggle.
Take Action
Now that we know what the struggle can do, this ask seems backwards: Go sign up for Hardbound. My job will be harder if you don’t, and maybe that will make me greater, but you really should.
