Entrepreneurship, Suffering, and the Refusal to Accept

Suffering = Pain × Resistance.

Nine years of founding a company taught me that equation in ways I didn't expect.

There's a Buddhist-inspired framework, developed by a meditation teacher named Shinzen Young, built around that idea. Pain is the fixed variable. It's unavoidable. Resistance is what you layer on top of it. The more you fight reality as it is, the more you suffer. Drop the resistance, and suffering collapses, even if the pain stays exactly the same.

The path to happiness, according to Shinzen, is acceptance.

Founders can't do that. Not fully. And I'd argue the best ones never will.

The job is resistance.

Resistance is refusing to accept that a problem can't be solved. Refusing to accept that an industry can't change. Refusing to accept that people have ceilings. The most successful founders push their teams, their products, and their industries forward with a relentlessness that is the direct opposite of acceptance. That refusal is the engine. And the source of enormous suffering. Not as a side effect. As a structural feature.

Here's what those nine years looked like: long days, early mornings, constant travel, bad pay, and carrying the hardest problems home with me. Not exactly a relaxing job description. A lot of the suffering came from a perpetual dissatisfaction. Refusing to accept where the product was. Refusing to accept where the team was. Refusing to accept where the market was. It's also what makes it hard to be a founder, and hard to work closely with one.

The same quality that makes a founder effective guarantees they will suffer more than most. It's not a bug. It's the nature of the work.

It doesn't mean you can't also love the work, the people, and the problems. I did. But I don't think there's a clean way out of the suffering that comes with it.

Here's what I've come to believe, at least for myself. This may not be true for everyone.

If suffering is inevitable, point it at something worthwhile. A mission you believe in. A problem that actually matters. People you'd go to the mat for.

The suffering is coming either way. What are you pointing it at?