I’ve had four conversations in the past year where someone said to me, “I have young kids / I have an existing life I’m happy with / I have existing obligations that I enjoy. I don’t know if starting a company is compatible with that.”
(The joke that I had in my head whilst writing this was “this is You Have a Choice except for business” cc @eric)
Indeed. And the corollary to You Have A Choice is “if you are willing to accept the consequences of your choice”, as you describe:
I don’t want you to think that there are no tradeoffs to these forms. Of course there are tradeoffs. If you choose to live on a boat and sail from country to country, you’re going to have some difficulty ordering stuff from Amazon. (You’re also going to have difficulty interacting with any bureaucracy that assumes you have a permanent residential address). You’ll have to develop workarounds for this facet of your life, in order to get what you desire.
What are you willing to tradeoff to get the business or life you want?
And, more importantly, what are you trading off if you accept the normative path? “I could never accept the uncertainty of running my own business” is less convincing these days when layoffs are commonplace. “I have to raise venture capital to fund my idea” comes with losing control and being forced into making low-probability high-return bets so that the VCs can make their desired returns on the timelines required by their LPs.
People often don’t even notice the pain and friction of the normative path because they just accept it as “that’s just the way it is”. But when you pay attention to the whole picture, you start to see the options available to you if you’re willing to make different tradeoffs.
The ‘of course there are tradeoffs’ bit of this essay briefly got my FOMO and self doubt juices flowing, so, a footnote:
If you’re reading this, you definitely don’t fully adhere to the dominant narratives of your local culture. Which is to say: the ability to make choices that fit you and your life, regardless of narratives, is a skill you already possess
Maybe you don’t notice it, but it’s there: consider a time when you said, “eh, no thanks” to something that fit a dominant narrative because you had a better idea: “Want to go out tonight?” “Nah, I’m on the verge of a breakthrough in this vibecoding project I’m working on; have fun, and let me know what happens.” Or, “Sorry, I’ve got a sick kid; let me know,” etc.
There are the tradeoffs we’re aware of when we choose, but that wasn’t what my ‘ugh, tradeoffs’ sentiment was responding to; I was instead reacting to a feeling about the unknown effects of choosing: the tradeoffs that come as a consequence of a choice that I can’t yet see. The uncertainty that comes along for the ride
Rereading through the quoted excerpts here I was reminded: both choosing and the uncertainty that follows is a normal, inevitable human experience. Chouinard faced it; Buffett faced it; and at key points both of them likely experienced a level of struggle with their choices that isn’t recorded publicly, though it’s hinted at here
The conceit of time travel stories that involve going into the past is: If you go into the past you will change the present. Well, we’re all traveling through time, at a rate of one minute per minute (with some time dilation variance for astronauts). We’re going to change the future, whatever we choose, and tradeoffs and uncertainty will follow. So we may as well change the future in ways that suit us