The Never-Ending Nexus

An uncomfortable truism has consumed my mind since the words were uttered. I resisted this idea, but the more I did, the more it persisted. “There are only three constants in life: pain, uncertainty, and work.”

There’s a distinct type of pain that first gripped me in college that now persists into my young adulthood. It manifests as a cocktail of feelings, feelings as innate to me as breathing: an unrelenting tug at the center of my chest, a spiral of knots twisting in the pit of my stomach, and a flushed hotness that wells in my cheeks.

The culmination of these symptoms acts as a relentless reminder of the social anxiety that anchors me.

Pain became an uninvited guest in my life when I started at Stanford. Coming from a small town and a home where neither parent had attended college, the scale of everything was amplified. Not just the size of the campus but the truth of my uncertainty.

The map sold me a ticket to a life of potential and promise. But the map was not the territory.

My peers spoke a language alien to me, honed in prep schools and refined with private tutors. The chasm between where I had come from versus where they did seeded a burden of not belonging, a burden I bore in silence.

I can remember lingering outside of dining halls where late-night tutoring took place. I would grapple with a gnawing paralysis as my mind tried to placate the choice in front of me: wrestle with my academic inadequacies alone or expose the depth of my ignorance to the world. My body chose for me; my limbs refused to carry me closer.

Each day felt like a revelation of my lack, each conversation a reminder of my naked experience.

I buried my burden with intensity. It juxtaposed my deepest desire: to be loved, celebrated, and welcomed for all I was. Anxiety became my craftsman of doubt, sculpting from within an adeptness at questioning my worth. It eroded the very sense of belonging that I sought.

Complicating the pain, the uncertainty and the work was my lack of self. I was unclear as to my principles, my purpose, and the contours of the man I wanted to become. I was ill-equipped to mold a persona that could resist the assault of my sense of unworthiness.

Today, Stanford's legacy continues to linger within me: its seeds of unease firmly rooted within the terrain of my professional life.

I view my role as an early-stage investor as a custodian of potential. It’s not just the capital I provide but the foundation I help to forge. I aim to find visionary, capable founders even before they are ready to start something. And to do this effectively, I must build authentic relationships that embody trust and inspire confidence.

That’s the essence of sales in this role – it’s the opportunity to convince these potential founders that I and the firm I represent are the right partners to stand alongside in their journey. This is the revisited challenge: a direct contrast to the introversion that I adopted during college.

To inspire trust and confidence implies a need to receive a judgment, a judgment for which I allowed myself to be insulated from at Stanford. To be great, I cannot allow the temptation of comfort to allow me to play small.

Attending events, whether industry mixers or invite-only hacker houses, still holds all the unsettling fear and suffering I’ve become attuned to.

But by confronting my perceived inadequacies, I know I am moving beyond the comfort of the X-axis.

The world is not moved by weak men with weak spirits and a weak compass. The world is moved by the bold who choose to stare into the unrelenting face of pain, uncertainty, and work.

And so, I work. And I work diligently, with a girded persistence, to face this suffering without hesitation. I was weighed down by the tension in my core but elevated by the certainty of who I would become.

While the truism that opened this essay is one that I’ve come to believe, I’ve also come to accept another: suffering is the price of admission to a meaningful life.

I don’t want this suffering, but I know now that this is my gift.

A gift that demands work as payment for the privilege.

And so, I meet the challenge of overcoming my suffering, knowing that I may never be able to manifest the same sense of worthiness that I lost after Stanford.

But I’ve chosen to stare into my own depth, my own weakness, and my own pain.

Within the raw fabric of my fear, I recognize that both what I want and what I want to avoid demand the same thing: to embrace my suffering.

The essence of my being lies on the other side of pain. It cradles the promise of my potential, a promise I welcome with undimmed faith. I will not settle for a life spent skirting the margins of mediocrity nor find solace in the silent struggle that echoes within my mind.

My gift demands that I evolve from the naivety of youth to the grandeur of bold and noble adulthood, unclothed and unshielded in the face of suffering.

As Viktor Frankel so aptly put, “What is to give light must endure burning.”

H/t to Frederik Gieschen from Alchemy of Money and Tom Morgan from What’s Important for the inspiration for the post and the graph included in this article, respectively.