The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F_ck

Failure itself is a relative concept. If my metric had been
to become an anarcho-communist revolutionary, then my
complete failure to make any money between 2007 and
2008 would have been a raving success. But if, like most
people, my metric had been to simply find a first serious job
that could pay some bills right out of school, I was a dismal
failure.
I grew up in a wealthy family. Money was never a
problem. On the contrary, I grew up in a wealthy family
where money was more often used to avoid problems than
solve them. I was again fortunate, because this taught me
at an early age that making money, by itself, was a lousy
metric for myself. You could make plenty of money and be
miserable, just as you could be broke and be pretty happy.
Therefore, why use money as a means to measure my selfworth?
Instead, my value was something else. It was freedom,
autonomy. The idea of being an entrepreneur had always
appealed to me because I hated being told what to do and
preferred to do things my way. The idea of working on the
Internet appealed to me because I could do it from
anywhere and work whenever I wanted.
I asked myself a simple question: “Would I rather make
decent money and work a job I hated, or play at Internet
entrepreneur and be broke for a while?” The answer was
immediate and clear for me: the latter. I then asked myself,
“If I try this thing and fail in a few years and have to go get
a job anyway, will I have really lost anything?” The answer
was no. Instead of a broke and unemployed twenty-twoyear-old
with no experience, I’d be a broke and unemployed
twenty-five-year-old with no experience. Who cares?
With this value, to not pursue my own projects became
the failure—not a lack of money, not sleeping on friends’
and family’s couches (which I continued to do for most of
the next two years), and not an empty résumé.