Death has a way of revealing us to ourselves.
It is the great, equalizing limit to humanity.
It can be a healthy motivator to reconcile or make amends.
Death can also be the catalyst for one to double down on selfish, destructive decisions (you only live once, after all). - Mike Schramm
I have been thinking about this a lot lately, mostly because I know how easy it is for me to measure life by what is visible. I do not think there is anything wrong with wanting to do good work or wanting to make something meaningful, but I have also learned that I can turn those things into a scoreboard pretty quickly if I am not careful.
A friend from my hometown called me about a week ago. We had not talked in quite a while, and he told me his mom had passed away. He was obviously hurting, distraught and we ended up talking for about an hour. At one point he brought up this memory of the three of us together, and he reminded me of something his mom had done for me many years ago. It was actually a huge thing for me at the time, and somehow I had completely forgotten about it.
That has stayed with me all week. I remember her mostly in these very ordinary ways. She was always pleasant to be around, super Catholic too, she would make us food, she hung out with us while we watched football games with everyone we invited to her house, she was around while we would play Halo yelling like idiots at the screen, she was an awesome mom to my friend and with cool with all of us. There was nothing performative about any of it, and I do not think she was keeping count of those moments or wondering whether any of us would remember them years later. Yet here we were all these years later, talking about her after she was gone, and one of those things she did had mattered enough that my friend still remembered it even when I did not.
I will not be able to make the funeral this week because I will be in GDLMX for Startup Day, but I have been continuously praying for her, doing rosaries and praying for the family as well. The timing of that conversation and then reading this article by Mike, has made me think a lot about what we actually count in life. We keep track of what we have and what we do not have, who is ahead, who is behind, whether we are living up to our potential, whether we are doing enough. A lot of that, at least for me, is probably just ego dressed up as ambition.
I hear the word mediocrity thrown around a lot, especially around entrepreneurs and people who like building things in Bitcoin. There is this idea that if you are not constantly becoming more successful, more productive, more impressive, then somehow you are wasting your life. I used to accept a lot more of that without really questioning it, but the more I read Scripture, go to church, and spend time around people who take their faith seriously, the less convinced I am that this is the right measurement.
I do not think the answer is to become indifferent either. I do not believe Scripture is telling us to bury our talents, stop trying, or accept being lazy because worldly success does not matter. If God gave you something, whether that is the ability to build, teach, lead, create, care for people, make money, solve problems, or whatever else it might be, I think you probably have some responsibility to actually use it. Being cynical about everything, doing nothing with what you were given, or convincing yourself that none of it matters does not feel right either.
Maybe the major distinction is less about greatness versus mediocrity and more about stewardship. It's true to use what we are given fruitfully? But am I becoming more useful to the people around me, or am I mostly trying to make the points on the scoreboard go up?
This Bitcoin bear market has made me think about that quite a bit too. Bear markets have a funny way of removing some of the noise and old habits. When the number is not constantly going up and everyone is not paying attention, you get a little more time to figure out why you are still doing any of this in the first place. What I know to be true is the things we build do matter collectively, they do more so than people realize, but I also understand now that a lot of meaningful things simply take much longer than we want them to.
We talk about low time preference all the time in Bitcoin, and I think there is something here that goes beyond money or store of value. The things worth building might take five years, ten years, twenty years, or longer, and sometimes you may not even be the person who gets to see the full result. The more I sit with that, the more I think the foundation you build matters a heck of a lot more than I used to believe in 2021.
It is not only whether the thing you built becomes successful. It is how you built it, who you became while building it, how you treated people along the way, whether you cut corners, whether you stayed honest when it was inconvenient, whether you built something people could actually use. Those are the things nobody really sees in the moment, but I think people can eventually feel them in what you make over time.
I would like to say I have always thought this way, but I do not think that would be true. In prior years I probably cared a lot more about the points on the board. I cared about whether something looked like it was working, whether it was growing, whether people noticed. Last year and this year especially, I think that has changed for me.
Because what good are all the points if they never produce a win?
And by a win, I mean something different than I used to. Something useful, that lasts and other people can pick up, test, improve, build on, or benefit from. Ultimately built on a foundation that does not collapse the second things get difficult or not praised.
Maybe that is why this week hit me the way it did. The life God is asking me to be faithful in is the one happening right now. The people right in front of me, the work I already said I would do, the gifts I already have, and the small things that might not look like much at the time to others.
My friend’s mom probably never thought one of those moments would come back to me years later and adjust my thinking after she was gone. She was just doing what she did. She was being a mom, taking care of people in her life, helping someone who needed it, even someone who's not her son.
At this time in my life, maybe a lot of the stuff that actually matters looks like that.
I am still ambitious and still want to build things, take risks, work hard, and use whatever God gave me as fully as I can. That will never stop. I just think I am becoming less interested in Jordan 96, 97 greatness for its own sake and more interested in whether the work is being done the right way.
I do not know if I have that figured out yet. I am mostly sharing what has been on my mind lately, while also exposing my faults and failures so you can avoid them yourself.
Maybe the better question is not whether I am living up to some abstract idea of my potential, but whether I am being faithful with what God actually put in my hands, using those gifts well, and trying to do something good with them while I still have the chance. Some things, I realize, can be experienced more deeply than they can ever really be explained.
Love, that speaks to me within my mind
With fervent passion of my lady,
Awakens often thoughts of her such that
My intellect is led astray by them.
His speech is filled with sounds so sweet
That then my soul, which hears and feels him, says:
“Alas, I lack the power to speak
Of what I hear about my lady!”
- Dante Alighieri
