Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It

Foreword

In December of 2011, I was invited to be a participant at Renaissance Weekend in Charleston, SC. Not what you think - no jousting knights or fair maidens. Instead, a conference attended by CEOs from Silicon Valley and New York, Hollywood types from LA, and politicians and their staff from DC. It's like TED, but everyone is assigned to participate in panels or give a talk. The application asked for awards won and recognitions received, and as an example, listed the Nobel Prize. Really.

I have no awards to speak of. Or pedigree. No Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley on my business card. When the founder of the event introduced me to the audience at a talk I gave - the title assigned to me, "If I could do anything..." - he said, "Kamal cannot keep still. Whether as an infantry soldier in the US Army or climbing the Himalayas or walking across Spain on an ancient pilgrimage, he's always moving." He'd done his research. I don't remember the rest, but I remember his last line, "I'm sure he'll have something interesting to share with us."

I had exactly two minutes to stand on a podium and address an audience of scientists, Pentagon officials, politicians, and CEOs - all far more qualified than I to talk about pretty much anything. The speaker before me had been the youngest person to graduate from MIT. Full honors, of course. Before him, the youngest Thiel fellow.

It's interesting what goes through your mind at moments like these. Time slows down, yes. But that's almost cliché. There's only the podium and the microphone. You step up. The audience grows blurry, as if out of focus. Clock starts.

And then I knew what to do. I would offer something no one else could. My truth. Something I'd learned purely from my experience, something that saved me. The audience came into focus.

"If I could do anything," I said into the microphone, "I would share the secret of life with the world." Laughter from the audience. "And I just figured it out a few months ago."

For the next two minutes, I spoke about the previous summer, when I'd been very sick, practically on bedrest. The company I'd started nearly three years ago was struggling, I'd just gone through a breakup, and a friend I loved suddenly died. "To say I was depressed," I told them, "would have been a good day."

I told them about the night I was up late, surfing Facebook, looking at photos of my friend who'd passed, and I was crying, miserable, missing her. I told them about waking up the next morning, unwilling to take it anymore, the vow I made, and how it changed everything. Within days I started to get better. Physically, emotionally. But what surprised me was that life got better on its own. Within a month, my life had transformed. The only constant being the vow I'd made to myself and how I kept it.

Afterwards, and for the rest of the conference, people came up individually and told me how much what I'd shared meant to them. One woman told me that sitting in the audience, listening to me, she'd realized that this was the reason she came. All I'd done was share a truth I learned.

A month later, a friend was going through a difficult time, so I quickly wrote up what I'd learned that summer and sent it to him. It helped him a lot. Months after, I shared it in an email with James Altucher, a friend and my favorite blogger. He replied, offering to feature it as a guest post on his blog.

Naturally, I refused.

Truth be told, I panicked. Lots of my friends read his blog. I'm an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley; it's fine to write about startups. But this stuff?

"You have to share this," James wrote back. "It's more important than 'here's how to be an entrepreneur' or 'here's how to bulk up in 30 days.' This is the only message that's important."

I shared my fear with him - what would people think? His response, something that I will never forget and will always be grateful for: "I don't do a post now unless I'm worried about what people will think about me."

So I struck a deal with him. I'd kept notes about what I'd learned, the practice, how I'd succeeded and failed. I would put those together in a book and send it to him. If he liked it, I'd publish it.

And that's how we ended up here.