Discipline Without Love Optimizes for the Wrong Variable
The last year and a half, but particularly the last six months, were incredible but also very very tough. I went through difficult personal problems and had to expand my tolerance for pain to extremes I didn’t know existed. You don’t fight pain by toughening up. You fight it by controlling what you let near you. I left alcohol, lowered my consumption of caffeine to bare minimums, deleted my instagram and removed most of the people I didn’t care about from my life and I doubled down on living with friends family and partners I love.
My father told me multiple times that I have lived multiple lives in one. It’s very likely that he has some responsibility for this because I became obsessed with adventures thanks to Jules Verne when I was a kid. I wanted to explore. I did trips to places and met people that you see only in nightmares. After getting burnt and almost dying multiple times I created LambdaClass and now Ergodic Group. Those near deaths weren’t only pain. Each one was teaching me the same thing: turn this into something that outlasts you, or it was just damage. I’m trying to do the same right now with what happened to me the last few weeks.
I remember like if it was yesterday the day I got lucky and saved my ass. I remember having lunch in Madrid with my uncle, who was equal parts admired and horrified by how far I’d taken things, and telling him: “I’m gonna change my life and build a small empire of companies”. That sentence, spoken across a table to someone who actually saw me, is the hinge my entire life now swings on. If I’m not mistaken I was around 25 years old that day. I had to transform my adventures into companies and a family of people that wanted to live building things for society rather than just pushing myself to my physical and psychological limit to prove myself. I learned something building that family: when aligned minds work together toward the same thing, they produce a third thing that none of them could have reached alone.
This is also when I became more capitalistic. Capitalism enables adventure seekers like myself to build value for others. Some of us get pleasure only by building and experiencing things, expanding from our comfort zone every day, getting punched every day by reality. Capitalism gives a path for these people to express themselves like artists, building companies freely, while everyone else wins in exchange great products and experiences built by the crazy ones. The day I decided to create Lambda and then Ergodic is the day I realized I could turn my tendency to look for new experiences into value for society. It’s the day I realized I’m a builder.
For years I thought building was enough. That if you constructed something real, companies, systems, value, the rest would follow. It doesn’t. Every book I read, every mentor I had, taught me to be disciplined, to have a clear goal, to build relentlessly. I was a lone warrior with friends, a sword and a purpose. Nobody taught me that the purpose itself was wrong. You can build everything you said you would and still realize you optimized for the wrong variable. Yesterday somebody showed me something about themselves that deeply broke my heart and opened it at the same time. That’s why I write this.
Today is another special day. It’s the day I fully understood that life is not only about building but about loving. I always loved friends, partners, family but I didn’t fully understand how important unconditional love is. I had been treating it as something that would arrive once I’d built enough, and I had it backwards. It was the point the whole time. It’s the only thing that can make people heal their problems, their traumas, their addictions, their sadness. Loving everyone, including your adversaries, is the most therapeutic thing you can do. Some people believe that just believing in things is enough and they will manifest it. Others, and I think I was one of them, are too rational and believe everything is fixed with routines and discipline. What I learned is that you need both. You need a stupid belief in yourself and the people around you, and you also need the routines and work to transform those beliefs into reality.
That’s the correction I’m making: discipline without love optimizes for the wrong variable. I’m going to love unconditionally everyone around me and double down on my almost militaristic routines, exercise while also stopping every once in a while to analyze myself and my life.
Why do I write this here? Writing is therapeutic for me. It’s a way of processing feelings and growing. Why make it public? Because maybe it’s useful for somebody. And because it exposes me. That exposure makes me feel I can’t lie to myself.
Keep creating, keep building, but love the people around you while you do it. That’s the part I almost missed.
To the person that taught me this: thank you. You showed me something about love that I couldn’t have learned any other way. Now stop running from the things that hurt. I hope you double down on the path you took. Don’t just patch the problem, fix it and grow. You can’t escape from yourself. Love yourself, heal, and trust that you are worth the work. I do.