Software startups take over your life. This isn’t a bad thing. Rapidly growing a company including simultaneously building an incredibly skilled team, fundraising, and writing code requires laser focus and surgical allocation of time. 

It’s not a journey most are able to take. But if you do, meditating on your personal life is just as important as how you think about your company, team and product. 

Brad Feld is a legendary startup investor who is not only incredibly skilled from a technical and business perspective, he’s widely known for his ability to weave topics on philosophy, mental health and more into his past experience as a successful entrepreneur. His study of philosophy as it relates to work in startups is incredibly compelling, as is his unafraid approach to openly discussing his personal life.

Learning from the best, I hope to do even a small fraction of the same here. 

The passing of time is an unambiguously good thing. There have been periods in my life where I wish time would stop so that I could capture a specific sense of joy or awe, but on the whole I have never felt afraid or sad about progressing through each year of my life.

Time heals painful parts of our past. Time provides the space for new experiences, new people, opportunities and relationships. It allows loss or shame to fall away gracefully and gives room to more fully herald new success. It allows for a myriad of types of experiences to fully set in and change your life. It affirms decisions you’ve made as the best path you could have possibly chosen to move forward or forces you to reckon with mistakes you can then use to learn more about yourself and grow from.

To me, the biggest tragedy in life would be to stay exactly where I am. And what better way to fight stagnation, pain, setback or sadness than to use the passing of time to make our lives stronger, more beautiful and more full of life every single day.