Knowing myself

Caring about your legacy is caring about what other people think of you, which is in my opinion, a flawed place to do any evaluation of your life. You should look back upon your experience and see, did I live a good life? Was this life long enough on the last day? Do I actually have any of those regrets? Did I waste my twenties and my thirties chasing work? Maybe to the detriment of everything else? Did I miss the childhood of my children because I was stuck in the office? Those are the kind of things that I think could seed you with regret. I strive to die on the last day feeling content about the time I spend here on this little blue dot.

The second thought I had was that “You've made it mountain”. You journey there and then all of a sudden, you've made it. It's a very binary, you did or you didn't. But I think actually, to an extent, recognizing, it's a bit of a journey as well and each moment in the journey can actually be deeply satisfying as well. I think yeah, you've started a company, and I think one of the things I recognize is that as a startup, there's always more to do. There's always more growth. There's always more things that you should and could do. But oftentimes, I think I often describe it as when you're walking up the mountain, it's not the peak that's the most satisfying, but also just stopping along the way and looking down the mountain, you're like, "Wow. Look how far we've come." This is really deeply satisfying.

I feel like a lot of the people that I met, especially earlier in my career, were people who were very hardworking but didn't necessarily have some sort of plan for themselves, if that makes sense. And I feel like that that comes with time. I feel like that comes with giving yourself that time to think, that time to understand what your intuition is telling you. I feel like it's, especially nowadays with social media and all the distractions and everything that's going on, I feel like we've lost that skill of really focusing on ourselves. It's not even about focusing around what's happening around us, but it's more around focusing on what's happening within us, that voice, that intuition.

And I feel like we've not given ourselves that breathing space, that time, to really understand what those intuitions tell us. And I feel like a lot of the people nowadays, I feel like they're not even aware that that exists. And this is the scary bit where you are stuck in this loop where your interactions with society, your news, everything that's around you is just sort of put in front of you and you're consuming exactly the same things that everybody else are consuming. And I think that also drives this lack of understanding of one's self in a way, which is leading to everybody acting in the same way, everybody doing the same things, everybody going for the same careers. I don't know, for me it's just a waste of potential.

I was struggling a little bit with how articulate am I or how effective my communication is. And I think I felt a little bit behind compared to other people in my workplace. I was comparing myself a lot. And so I started maybe resenting the fact that I was not better at public speaking or similar things. And then at some point I remember, I can pinpoint exactly at which point it started being more clear to me, but I realised that it's okay. It's okay to not be perfect at everything. I've realised that my strengths reside in other things and yeah, I can pinpoint exactly to the right moments, but the moment we you realise that we're all just doing our best and no one is perfect at everything.

And you just have to continue to try to improve and continue to lean into the things that you're great at. Then it starts to feel better, but you need to have that moment of acceptance.

I spent a lot of time, probably in the last 10 years, through a combination of therapy, meditation, journaling, making mistakes, wondering why I made mistakes, kind of trying to figure it out, figure myself out, and I think I know myself pretty well now, although I continually surprise myself every day. So one of the things I know myself to be and I'm comfortable with, is I have found myself to be a pretty reflective person, and I always strive to not be reactive and always be reflective. And it frustrates people sometimes, because they often won't get an answer from me immediately. And part of the job of being at this stage of a company is you need to make decisions pretty quickly.

But I've learned that if I give myself a bit of time, doesn't need to be long, could be a couple of hours, could be sleep on it, shower, weekend, whatever, that's the sort of cycle it takes me personally. What I find is that I can recognize, I'm in a place now where I can sort of recognize when I'm for feeling a certain kind of way, then start to ask myself the question, "Why do I feel that certain kind of way? And what does it mean?" And that's been part of a very long path of continual reflection, spending time on myself. I think really, if you want to sort of distill it down, it is literally that. Spending time to ask yourself why you do what you do. What is it about? I don't know. Why does some interaction provoke some sort of emotional response, and what does that teach you about yourself?