Steak and Fries
As a hobby, I run marathons. This means I watch my diet pretty closely, usually avoiding unhealthy foods. When I do allow myself the indulgence of ordering a steak, I always choose to substitute the fries with a salad. Perhaps it’s out of a misguided delusion that eating a side salad rather than grease-laden fried potato strips somehow ameliorates the health implications of eating red meat. So, when I ordered steak on a recent business trip, it came as an unwelcome surprise to me that the waiter refused to substitute my fries with a side salad. I was told that I was welcome to order a salad if I liked, but if I wanted to have the steak, I had to accept the accompanying fries.
Okay. Fries it was.
Who cares, right? First-world problems. But I have a passion for finding life lessons in the most mundane occurrences in life—I believe that simple, yet profound wisdom can be found in almost any situation. In this instance, I learned that in life, and this particular restaurant, one cannot always order a la carte. If you choose to be an engineer, entrepreneur, poet, parent, or priest, you must embrace both the privileges of assuming these roles, as well as the inherent challenges.
All too often we make choices based on the potential remuneration of pursuing a pathway, whether it’s driven by finances, reputation, fun, or some other perceived benefit. Option A will make me rich. Or famous. Or give me more time to sleep. Or offer more time to spend with my family. Often, we don't realize that it is equally—or more—important to pick the challenges we want to face rather than just the benefits we want to accrue. We should take on the role of being an entrepreneur not simply because of our aspirations for creative expression or autonomy, but because the enormous challenges of starting a business resonate with us.
I’ve become an expert in life in pursuing aspirations whose rewards appealed to me, yet whose challenges I struggled to embrace. I started out as an engineer, only to shift gears and pursue medicine. I spent a decade in medicine, became board-certified and licensed, only to leave the world of medical practice for public equity investing. I then left behind public equity investing to start my first venture enterprise—only to later leave it to found Northpond Ventures. After countless hours laboring to become something I wasn’t well suited for—an engineer or a physician—I finally arrived at the position that provided both my ideal benefits and challenges.
What made starting Northpond different from my other pursuits? To me, it’s a function of alignment with my passions and talents. This sort of alignment doesn’t subvert the challenges but rather makes these challenges more worthwhile. As it turns out, I was willing to endure every challenge I faced in medicine through sheer will. Yet when I walked away with all the diplomas and certifications, I realized I didn’t feel deeply passionate about medical practice. In contrast, with science-driven entrepreneurship and venture capital, I found that the challenges and demands of the job emboldened me, rather than dejected me. I no longer felt like a warrior going into battle, but rather a missionary who saw all the challenges and difficulties as part of the journey.
I was willing to eat a pile of greasy fries to have my steak.
Earlier in my life, I had mistakenly come to believe that when I found something I was truly passionate about—or good at or meant to do—the challenges and difficulties would disappear. I imagined that I’d be draining proverbial jump shots like Steph Curry and shrugging my shoulders while doing it. Thirty footers, “All day, baby!”
Nothing has proven to be further from the truth. Life is filled with challenges. They’re a constant. Because of this, doing what I love or what I’m better at hasn’t actually mitigated the challenges. One doesn’t become a parent to make life easier. One doesn’t become a business owner to get more time off. To find fulfillment and some modicum of success in any role, one must truly love the journey, not just the outcome or the optics. If you can’t find the beauty and the meaning in the bumps and bruises, the heartaches and the tough lessons, the shortcomings, and the injustices, then the process of waiting for those rarefied moments of glory will be unbearable.
In other words, if you can’t take the fries with the steak, order something else.
Don’t bemoan the challenges. Don’t try to avoid them. They will find you. Instead, design your life so that the challenges you face are products of your passion, and are inevitable steps on your journey toward a true calling. If you can do this, you will not only persist in the face of adversity, you will find beauty in the obstacles.