To live is to challenge Life, to want to achieve something in Life is to challenge myself, to be entrepreneurial is to take that challenge up a few notches

Sure, everyone knows (reads “is cautioned that”) that starting up is difficult, messy, long and almost certainly ends up as an awkward stalemate with failure. A stellar start-up, which is often envisioned, is something short of being impossible – improbable.

But to challenge the impossible is the point isn’t it?

At least for me it is, when I dug really deep down inside myself with the questions of “whys”.

To me, Life is worth living because in continuously challenge myself and I can continue to grow and understand myself in subtler ways.  It is both a want and a need. Sometimes the former when I feel that Life is unexciting and overwhelmingly mundane or when Life seems hopelessly trivial and grey. Sometimes the latter, when I feel that am invincible and too comfortable, it’s a good clarion call to humble me.

It is in the challenge and the doing that spurs the imagination of man and ingrains a purpose, albeit temporarily, which drives man to excel. I think I man is born to recognize greatness and I am attracted to journey of achieving it. I think its sexy, the thrill and adrenaline rush. To be so consumed by a pursuit, is sweet.

Yet on the flip side: Isn’t it dark, to have such a last, to want pleasure that borders on exquisite pain (the anguish, the sobriety, the deflations, the lost and more)? To only be sated, to truly feel alive, only in moments during which I find within myself the courage and integrity to keep going on – struggling against the odds and against myself.   

I might be considered as masochistic in the boarder sense of it, but I see it as a triumph over the human condition, to master pain (what about pleasure?) and continue to growth and excel. The price, in the context of entrepreneurship, of course, has been named in the essay of Paul Graham.

The other option of a nameless, grey, muted nobody-ness can’t be that appealing, can it? – A hyperbole, but by no means to belittle, I am only against those who trash Life and give up on themselves. My choice is clear.

Some other remarks:

“The best way to put it might be that starting a startup is fun the way a survivalist training course would be fun, if you're into that sort of thing. Which is to say, not at all, if you're not.” – And that is Life as well, for quite a few people. Without the will to betterment/survival, is there an intrinsic worth in Life?

If success is incremental, what of failure?

“Over-engineering is poison. It's not like doing extra work for extra credit. It's more like telling a lie that you then have to remember so you don't contradict it.” – Perhaps, the slip shot analogy is not half as inaccurate, as lying takes much thinking (engineering) to maintain and extend its elaboration.

Guy Kawasaki, offers a tat more executable ideas, yet lacks the flair or the framework. -.-, sinfully, I bought and read his book, Reality Check ( a book aimed at start ups), which is as he mentioned a compilation of his blog posts. Digestable, yes. Funny, yes. Enlightening, not really, which defeats the whole point of reading it.

To end off, I offer you this conversation between U2 Bono and Tony Blair to explain my impassioned radicalness:

Bono: What do you do when you see Mount Everest before you?

Tony: I don’t know. Take a picture?

Bono: You f***ing climb it. (Pardon the implied vulgarity).

Ps. Viva (Ita.) – means both salutation and applause as well as Life.  And hence, intrinsic in the idea of Life, is the notion of achievement, intertwined.