The year of not giving up
There were many times this past year when I regretted starting a company.
An email to friends and former colleagues asking for feedback would receive polite but distant replies. Or no reply at all. A stranger would subscribe and then cancel the next day. Someone at a party would ask, “Are you still working on your AI stock thing?” and I’d catch a note of condescension in their voice.
Everyone tells you that starting a company is ten times harder than it seems, but you don’t believe them until you experience it firsthand. You go to dark places in your mind. You feel totally alone. You try to remember why you started in the first place. You stumble forward, hoping the world will eventually bend in your favor.
The two most important books I read this year were Living an Examined Life by James Hollis and The Creative Act by Rick Rubin.
Hollis’s book, written from a Jungian perspective, is an appeal to live the second half of one’s life more authentically than the first. To do this, you have to put aside the weight of tradition, childhood demons, outdated self-beliefs, and aim towards the highest, truest version of yourself.
Rubin’s book is ostensibly about the spiritual and practical aspects of succeeding as an artist. But it can be read more broadly as a guide to living a life that’s true to your deepest sense of self, artist or otherwise. One doesn’t succeed by accident, but by setting up the conditions to consistently channel your experience, inspiration, and voice into something you can share with like-minded people.
Taken together, these books helped me see my struggle in a new, broader context. The reason I quit my job and started my own company was to pursue an authentic, self-chosen path, living wholeheartedly and in service to higher ideals. Living this way would be a success in itself.
At some point this year, I started listening to Bach on repeat. I’d have it in my headphones as I walked to the outdoor gym. Tucked next to the water, it’s one of my favorite places in Stockholm. In the late fall, I watched trees shedding their leaves and squirrels gathering acorns, and felt a deep, grand sense of peace. These moments, experienced with a quiet, untroubled mind, were among the most meaningful of the year.
With this mindset, I started to notice how the opinions of others and the noise of “the current thing” seemed less important. The online world, with it’s endless stream of opinions, propaganda, advertisements, ignorance, boasts, and hype called for only one response: indifference.
This clarity of mind helped me gain a renewed sense of purpose in my stupid little startup.
The main reason startups fail is that founders give up. But if you refuse to quit, you eventually run out of excuses. And then you see it: the primary obstacle is yourself.
During my mornings with Bach, amid falling autumn leaves, I often thought about a quote from Nietzshce:
…to do something and do it again, from morning till evening, and then to dream of it at night, and to think of nothing except doing this well, as well as I alone can do it. When one lives like that, one thing after another that simply does not belong to such a life drops off. Without hatred or aversion one sees this take its leave today and that tomorrow, like yellow leaves that any slight stirring of the air takes off a tree.
For 2026, I want only the freedom to spend another year doing the work.