Jan Gunash

What type of masochist are you?

What are you willing to struggle for? What problems do you actually like having in your life? What part of the grind do you secretly enjoy that most people don’t?

Mine is an obsession with solving problems.

I am a brute force, persistent, can’t-move-until-it’s-done problem solver. I think a lot of it traces back to growing up with video games. Hours on the couch. Failure after failure. Skipping lunch and dinner to finish something I started. The reward?

Honestly, nothing.

Did it feel good when I finally beat the level? Not really. It felt like it should have been easier. Did I do it again the next day? Always.

That is the part most people miss. The reward was never the dopamine hit at the end. The reward was the willingness to sit in the discomfort of not being done yet.

If you were going to design a human to be resilient, how would you do it?

Probably not by giving them things too easily.

How would you make them patient?

Probably not by giving them things too fast.

We already know the answer. We just rarely apply it to ourselves.

The trick is figuring out how to turn that into your superpower instead of your suffering.

A lot of this ties back to recent conversations I have been having about happiness. Shout out to Aristotle, because he had this figured out a long time ago. There are two versions of happiness.

Hedonia is the comfort kind. Dopamine, pleasure, the surface-level stuff. Eudaimonia is the deeper one. Life satisfaction. Meaning. The feeling that what you are doing actually matters.

Here is the part that took me a while to internalize: the more you chase a positive experience, the more the chase itself becomes negative. The more you accept a negative experience, the more the experience itself becomes positive. The harder you try to be happy all the time, the more easily you get upset. The more you accept that life is hard and things go wrong, the more easygoing you actually become.

Happiness is not something you chase. It is a side effect of doing something that matters.

This came up recently.

I had coffee with another founder last week. Young kids, working 60-plus hours a week, feeling a real disconnect from his son. He told me, “I have to decide whether I keep pushing this startup or I become more present with my son.”

I sat with that for a minute. Because I have been there.

I am there.

But I think the framing is wrong. We default to OR when the answer is often AND.

What does it take to have both? What if time with your family is the baseline, the thing that does not move, and the rest of life gets built on top of that? What are your non-negotiables, and are they actually showing up first in your calendar, or are they the thing that gets squeezed when work runs late?

The OR forces a sacrifice. The AND forces creativity. It forces you to redesign your day, redesign your business, redesign what you are willing to tolerate. It is harder. It takes more thought. It is the kind of problem that does not get solved in one sitting.

But those are the kinds of problem I like having.