Dave Kashen argues that suffering comes from the gap between life as it is and the stories your mind tells about how it should be. Acceptance of what is, rather than attachment to those stories, brings peace. He frames this especially for entrepreneurs.
A cliché thing I sometimes say is you can't get there until you're here. Same idea. Like we're holding on to the past, holding on to stories. If I go really meta, I just think there's like life and then there's our mind's idea of how life should be. And at any given moment, we're sort of choosing between the two. And if we choose our mind's idea of how life should be or should have been, right, to your point, we create suffering for ourselves. And if we choose life as it is, then we don't suffer. And most people play the game, including entrepreneurs, maybe especially entrepreneurs, play the game of like, let me get life to match my mind's idea of how it should be, which could work for like a minute. But even then, like the fulfillment and peace that you have when you finally got the big, you know, payoff or outcome or whatever, you know, it doesn't last very long. Or you play this game of, can I learn to be with life, accept life as it is? And to your point, Jesse, that a lot of the, the mediating way that we do that is, do we believe our stories about how life should be or do we not?
