Now this is a topic everyone will have their own opinions on and i have been thinking about it for the better part of the last decade. One of my best friends from Uni, Orpheas, and i would discuss the most random topics during lunch hour and this is one that we spent years maturing about. We eventually reached an analytical conclusion to this everarching question on a rainy night along with his brother as we slept on the floor of a flat we were remodelling in Denia.
First. I would like to put out there that life is finite. Even for those that try to maximise longevity. In all of us there is a limited temporal axis across X.
Second. For me, to be alive means you are creating friction across a medium. Just as a particle moves through a space and the deposited energy is then recorded. This is what we would commonly refer to as experiences. Hence we can put these on a Y axis.
Graph 1 — temporal vs experience axis, defining what it means to be alive as described by Function 1.
So to live, one could analytically describe life as the volume resulting from moving through life recording absolute peaks of experiences (good or bad / positive or negative events).
And these events can be as simple as finding someone you love or as random as visiting the Antarctica. Every event can carry a meaning.
This is a description that brings me peace.
Now, this also raises some questions as I was discussing in the shore of a beach in Maui with my good friend Daniel Dippold. His question was whether a prospective founder should drop out of school to build their startup and we spent quite some time philosophying around this topic.
My point to him then was, what happens when we live too fast?
Logically, if we analyse our graph, the X axis is defined by time and that is the one thing we can never get back. It is a one way street. When someone drops out of high school or even too early in their university/work experience life, they are bringing peaks of experiences into their Y axis that they could very easily live later in time. Yet that comes at the cost of potentially giving up on other experiences that often can only be experienced in those late teens early twenties of our life.
As experience has shown us, those years is when one is "technically" the most free. One is studying and they have no responsibilities. No family to provide for, no boss telling you what to do apart from your professors asking for some homework every now and then, and no need to worry about taxes even. You have the freedom to make mistakes, to skip class without consequences, to play sports, and join clubs to learn new skills and languages. You have the chance to get drunk for the first time with your friends and laugh about that for the rest of your life.
On the other hand though, someone that forfeits these years to get a head start and build their first startup is potentially giving up on one of the best maturing experiences of life. Not because you cannot experience these later in life (I mean, getting drunk in your thirties/forties does not feel as nice or look as good as doing it when you are younger) but because you have taken extra obligations in your shoulders that you cannot ignore. You have investors to respond to, teammates to manage, a product to sell... And yet, most studies have shown that the chances of your first startup becoming the one Unicorn you build in your career are close to none. That is a lot to ask from someone that, we could assume, is still processing the first 20% of their life.
So, would it make sense to drop out to start your own company early? I know Paul Graham said in a lecture at Stanford in the early 2010s that you should not rush to start your own company. Quoting the example of Mark Zuckerberg as a successful young billionaire who gave up on the opportunity of being anonymous and exploring life without being stopped every few minutes by someone asking for a selfie (or autograph as Paul said).
I guess that question is up to you to answer.
But even though that X axis might seem frightening to some, the idea of mortality is not happily embraced, it is still a pretty long temporal line. There is plenty of time for everything we want in life.
There is no need to rush. Everything happens when it has to happen.
So if i can share one piece of advice. That is: Live.