Foreword: I wrote the below reflections for myself as a north star and a guiding line I can hold onto as we all go into the new year. I decided to publish it, because I trust that it is safe to be vulnerable with you, and because I suspect some of the learnings may be useful to you or others.

Looking back I can see that since May 2020 (I had just turned 26) I have undergone, thanks to therapy, what one could describe as a great healing. This healing is of the mind, but analog to physical healing from, e.g. a splinter, which might be stuck and terrorize the sole of one's foot. Therapy and self-reflection is a tool for me to identify and remove mental splinters, which cause discomfort and on removal bring relief and increase in agency that is similar to the one that one experiences with the physical equivalent.

Between May 2020 to 2022 I was able to remove many old splinters with the help of Caroline and Matt, which led to many small and immediate positive changes in my life that I would categorize to have greatly strengthened the relationship with myself. In 2022 the removal of various splinters led me to reevaluate and strengthen the relationship with my romantic partners. And in 2023 it brought about big changes in my relationship to work - those I will elaborate on here.

Reflections

The year started with the successful closing of an inaugural £85m fund for the VC firm I was working for and the possibility of me becoming Partner and COO in the coming year(s) was floated. Initial excitement was followed by more sober reflections (not entirely unrelated to the passings of my grandparents in February) and through months-long discussions and negotiations about the ins and outs of this role and the path there, made clear that eventually becoming COO for the VC firm may not be what both parties really want and need. Speaking for my side, I realized that a more “create-ive” role with greater autonomy and impact is what I really wanted and so we realized that we may have to alter our working relationship. The entire execution of this was more unskilled on both sides than I would like to admit. But the point is this: In the first half of 2023 I recognized that SOMETHING needed to change and I think in the end parting ways with the VC firm I spent more than 4 years working on, even if that was a very though pill to swallow and more poorly executed still, was the right choice.

Naturally this had me jump head first into a new venture, as this was a familiar pattern for me. The initial months were great, my co-founder and I enjoyed working with each other, we were full of energy and enthusiasm, and to my positive surprise I realized that many things that I have feared and was traumatized by from my last startup (in 2018 long before my healing started) got cured and healed somewhere along the way. I was different and I have grown and so it and the experience of doing another startup was different and even more enjoyable.

However, as my co-founder and I started to hit some hardships, as is unavoidable with any venture, cracks started to become apparent and it become clearer that on some topics we were not on the same page. Trying to navigate and bridge these differences helped me greatly improve the understanding of my values and myself in general. What surprised me was that this old familiar pattern, the what, the how, and the why, of doing startups has changed in profound ways for myself. In this sense, the second half of 2023 was crucial, because I gave me the experience to go from “SOMETHING needs to change” to figuring out the WHAT needs to change and WHY.

In the last few weeks I reflected on those experiences and tried to make sense and learn from it. The result of which, that is the the changes that the experiences of the last year in particular brought about in me and the changes that I now want to bring about in my relationship with work going forward, I will articulate below.

Learnings

Before I go into the individual learnings, I want to make explicit the role that 2023 has in my healing. I see it like this: Sometime around late 2022/early 2023 I first had a feeling that there is probably a splinter somewhere in the vicinity of my relationship to work. Just a hunch and entirely sure how severe that spliter is. But I realized that the work situation I was in, might also be precisely because of this potential spliter, as it avoids triggering it, i.e. it is comfortable. But, in my striving for health and living an examined life, and maybe not having enough patience, I knew that something needed to be done to trigger, identify, and remove the splinter. The events of which I recounted above.

Now, what I found is this: The splinters were deep and related to how I define my self-worth (and the worth of others), how I define my capabilities, and how I define my purpose. All things which are, for me at least, closely related to my work.

Purpose: I have no intrinsic purpose. No one has. This is because purpose is not static, it is dynamic and it is created and it will change. This means that no activity has any intrinsic purpose either, we bestow purpose onto activities. Finally, purpose is not absolute, many activities or things can have purpose but some have more purpose than others. So if this is the nature of purpose what can be said about it? I think an important realization is this. Purpose must be both selfish and selfless.

By selfish I mean, it must be enjoyable in the here and now for oneself in a primitive and mundane way. The activity must give one "security”, “power”, “status", “pleasure”, whatever it is that one deeply enjoys and craves, but we must not deny or look down upon this enjoyment, because it is the fuel that ensures we stick with it and keep going. There is no "greater" purpose to be found if we deny ourselves (unless denying yourself is deeply pleasurable to you). Life is not more virtuous and more purpesful if we self-sacrifice. So make sure that what you do is deeply enjoyable to you. But keep in mind that what you crave and what is enjoyable to you may change over time and with it will change how much purpose you find.

By selfless I mean, we will find more purpose in activities the more useful and beneficial the activity or the fruits of the activity are to others. Keep in mind that others also includes yourself, most likely your future self. It may also include your children and your family. But it must also include everyone else, including those that are most dissimilar to you. I think ethically, one has reason to care more about the people most aligned with you, but the point is this: maximizing the benefit for as many people as possible results in more purpose.

So in summary, you find purpose in activities but how much purpose you experience will change. To find your purpose follow what is deeply enjoyable to you and then try to make this as useful and beneficial to as many people as you can. That’s it. I think I largely knew that, but it is good to have this as a very simple formula.

Worth of Myself and Others: How worthy am I? Am I worthy at all? Where does my worth come from? I thought for a long time that my worth comes from the fact that I am “special”. What do I mean by that? I mean that I felt (and to some degree still feel) that I am "better than other people”. In school, while I did not have the best grades, I seemingly accomplished more and earlier than almost any person around me, and I thought that this must mean that I was somehow special. The curious bit was just that I was never able to locate where this specialness resided in.

Whenever I felt not special, i.e. when I felt ordinary, I tried to get back to feeling special by reminding me of it. The issue was though that I never knew in what my specialness was grounded in. Naturally, I never deeply investigated this conundrum and painted over it with two equally wrong lines of reasoning. First, that I was somehow really smart, robust, or talented and much more so than others. This was quickly debunked because more often than not the reason why I felt ordinary was because there was someone smarter, more robust, more talented, ... than me. So I grudgingly semi-agreed that I am somewhat smart, robust, and talented but in no way special, just a little bit more or less ordinary. Second, and this was harder to debunk, I felt that my specialness was rooted in somehow being "chosen". There was a larger plan, for which I was made in particular and was more suited for than anyone else, and that is what made me special and I only had to find it and all would be good. I came to understand (see purpose section above) that this can not be and is in fact not so. The final, painful conclusion is this: One may be beautiful, smart, talented, in fact one may be all of those things at once and yet one is just more or less ordinary like everyone else - never "special". Extraordinary, unusual, extremely rare - absoluteley, but never special special. And the problem with defining self-worth by how positively rare you are is that it is fragile, needs constant validation, and is simply under the light of reality not tenable.

So where does my worth come from then? It comes from utilizing and developing ones potentials to the best of ones abilities for the service of others. It is an intention. And having that intention and faithfully executing it is what makes one worthy. Others have called this intention “noble” or “heroic”. In this sense we all have worth and all are various forms of noble. And being noble works better than being “special”, because “specialness” creates a false divide between the few who are “special” and the many who are “ordinary”. With being noble, i.e. when we hold the intention of doing our best for the service of others, everyone is more or less noble, no-one is excluded, and secondly does not need confirmation and no protection against reality, because it is true and to see if it is we simply check our intention.

To complete that thought, being noble is not the same as being “good”. I think there are two types of being good - “morally good”, i.e. the conformist and often unimaginative following of rules as they are defined by society and “extraordinarily good” or “great”, i.e. having, over a long period, continuously risen up to service others. So being noble can lead to extraordinary goodness, but goodness in the more common moral sense is not the same as being noble. This also reminds me of people who feel a strong need to show or demonstrate their goodness publicly, which is most likely to convince oneself or others of their “specialness”. Specialness serves in order to rise, but nobility rises in order to serve.

I think I have more work to do before I feel that I have fully resigned my “specialness”, but I want to resign it for nobleness as being “noble” maps more closely to reality and I think it aligns naturally with how I think of my purpose above. To close this out, this remindes me of my wish to be more "humble" that I noticed developed in the last few months. But I was not sure how I would do that. I thought I need to tone something down, I think I understand now that defining your worth from nobleness and toning down "specialness" may be the answer. To paraphrase, Bert Hellinger, true humility requires the courage for greatness (striving for nobleness). I take this to mean that without striving for greatness you will not have true humility, in the same way that you will not be truly fair if you have no power, or truly kind if you have nothing to loose.

Capabilities: I am not capable to do everything. I am not even capable of doing anything. My powers are finite as are everyone else's. As I have full control over very things, I do not have to blame myself for everything that happens to me. This is true for successes as well as for failures. Of course I have some control over the outcomes but not fully. And so the following is true: I am not in full control of my destiny or the future. This is scary, but true.

Out of the three things, I think I have the most to learn here still. What am I supposed to make of the fact that I do not have full control over my destiny? I think being less serious and more light-hearted. Creating reality with others and the world in a more playful way. Related to “specialness” above, I should also realize that almost everything that I have is because of other people. This includes my traits and abilities. Yes, not everything I have was handed to me, I did have to put in energy, but everything that was given to me and even the things that I have earned, almost all of those things where created by other people. We all truly stand on the shoulders of giants and that makes me feel grateful.

One by-product of this is that I do not have to care so much about outcomes. A certain type of aggressiveness and vigilance can give way here to a more effortless form of creation. As some of the unnecessary and overt aggressiveness is ineffective if not actually harmful to outcomes, I can dial it down a bit and put some of that aggressiveness into places where it matters more (see below).

Let’s put all these things together and make it concrete:

2024

I go into 2024 with a few big, work-related splinters being in various stages of (un)identified, removed, and recovered from. This is a process and will take many more months to complete from my experience and what I gathered from the literature, so the following is a north start for myself for this year.

1. I am a developer. Developing is such a beautiful activity. It requires vision, bravery, strength, tenacity, love, care, curiosity - all things that make me feel very alive. My realization was that as a developer one must not work for a Venture Capital firm - no matter how comfortable and amenable it is. It is a place for reprieve from the hardship, but not ones destination. The place of a developer is in the trenches, boots on the ground, not in the ivory tower of Private Equity. Not that there is anything wrong with being an investor, they are an important part of the ecosystem, and maybe one day I will return to that, but it is just not for me right now.
2. On a second rung I am an explorer. I am drawn to the unknown, the unexplored, the novel. I like to develop at the frontiers. This is what is deeply enjoyable and meaningful for myself and how I like to be useful to others. I have not taken this seriously enough, however. I have not trusted myself enough. Wanting certain outcomes I stayed in the "shallow waters" and thought I can "engineer" success, but this makes you serious and vigilant and rigid. The answer is to create more light-heartedly, embrace the uncertainty, the complexity, others, and the beauty of the journey with little regard for the outcome - this is hard, but something I want to master. Here are some people and their journeys that inspire me: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates tinkering with microcomputers (what later would become the first personal computers) around 1975 - Bill Gates building software (a programming language for the first, “real” microcomputer Altair 8800) and Steve Jobs building hardware (adding video and keyboard circuitry onto the microprocessor board to allow for more low-cost video output over the Altair 8800). I want to be clear that it is not the eventual "success" they had that inspires me, it is their exploration and development of a remote, underexplored, underappricated niche that they enjoyed. That this niche happened to become monumental may speak to the quality of their taste but is of secondary importance. There are of course countless other examples, just from the top of my mind: Vitalik Buterin, Palmer Lucky, Mitchell Hashimoto, John Harrison (reading about him and visiting his tomb in Hampstead still counts as one the most inexplicable and most memorable joys of my life) .
3. Walk first, then run: With all of the above, I feel my direction for 2024 is clear. The focus that it brings is new and exciting and I think that this allows me to be actually MORE AGGRESSIVE. This focus allows me to prune harder and push harder even though there is no particular objective. I don't want to jump all the way in though. Let's test the above waters over the next few weeks and months and gently try all the parts and see if they feel right and good. If they do, however I think they allow me to lean in harder than I haver ever done before. And I can do that, because I know that following the above I will be good to myself and good to others and in some way it is my moral responsibility to push as hard as I can - of course never so hard that I hurt myself or others.
4. Professional plan for 2024: The plan is both clear yet highly non-specific. What is there to do? Explore opportunities, i.e. under-explored and under-occupied niches. Follow the opportunities that I enjoy and find interesting and think I can develop to be useful and beneficial to a lof of people. While I explore and develop, make friends along the way and keep learning. To make sure I develop efficiently and go in the right direction follow the dev protocol. Practice, be mindful, and have fun - that's really it :)