Gravity draws people to you. Here is what to do when they come, and why it is the most meaningful thing in this entire journey. If you are building alone, without a peer group, this letter is the one I most want you to reach.
If you are building something alone, without a peer group, the hardest part is often not the work itself. It is going through it without anyone who understands. The decisions no one can share. The weight no one else feels. The trials you cannot fully explain to the people in your life because they have not been where you are, and so you carry it in a particular kind of solitude that the people around you, however much they love you, cannot reach into.
This loneliness is real, and I am not going to minimize it, because it is one of the genuine costs of the path you have chosen. The entrepreneur carrying it alone often feels that no one sees the actual weight, that the struggle is invisible, that they are the only one who has ever felt exactly this. The feeling of it is heavy, and it makes the fire harder than it would be if you had even one person beside you who truly understood.
But there is something on the far side of carrying it alone that redeems the loneliness, and it is one of the most meaningful things that can happen to a person who has been through a fire. You become the one who understands. The very thing you went through without a guide makes you able to be the guide for the next person who is entering it without one. Your solitary ordeal becomes the exact qualification that ends someone else’s solitude.
This is the transfer, and it is the point the whole fire was building toward, even though you could not see it while you were in the fire. Everything you learned in the dark, the hard way, with no one to tell you, becomes transmissible the moment you meet someone now in the dark you already came through. You can say to them the thing you wished someone had said to you. You can give them words for what they are feeling, because you remember exactly what it felt like to have no words for it. You can tell them that the flat middle ends, that the borrowed confidence comes back as something better, that they are stronger than they have had reason to know, because you have been where they are and you came out, and your coming out is proof that they can too.
What makes this transfer so powerful is that it carries the weight of the arena, not the stands. Anyone can offer encouragement from the outside, and it slides off, because the person in the fire can feel the encourager has not been there. But when the encouragement comes from someone who has obviously walked through the same fire, it lands completely, because it is recognized as true. You become, for the person coming up behind you, the one voice that actually knows, and that voice is worth more than a hundred voices from the comfortable stands.
I think often about a young man I met during the hardest stretch of my own life, who had every kind of leadership instinct in him and no one to transmit a standard to him, no one who had been where he was going to tell him what it would take. I have not been able to stop thinking about him, because he is so many people. The world is full of people in the fire with no one who understands, and every person who has come through a fire is the answer to someone else’s solitude.
The leader who has reached the transfer experiences something that changes the meaning of everything they went through. The trials stop being only loss. They become curriculum. The fire stops being only something you survived. It becomes the thing you are now uniquely able to help others survive. And in giving it away, you discover that the loneliness you carried was not wasted, because it qualified you to end someone else’s, and there is a deep and specific joy in that which the comfortable will never know, because they never paid the price that makes the gift possible.
This is also where your own loneliness finally finds its company, though not in the way you expected. You do not get back the peer group you lacked in the fire. What you get is something arguably better. You get to become, for others, the thing you needed and did not have, and in the giving, you are no longer alone, because you are joined to everyone you are helping and to everyone who helped you, in a long line of people passing the standard forward, each one ending the solitude of the one behind them.
So if you are in the fire right now, carrying it without anyone who understands, hold onto this, because it is true and it is coming. The day will come when you become the one who helps. Everything you are learning in the dark right now, the hard way, with no one to guide you, is going to become the exact thing you give to someone else in the dark you came through. Your loneliness is not the end of your story. It is the training for the most meaningful thing you will ever do, which is to turn around, once you are through, and reach back for the next person. They are coming. They will need exactly what you are learning right now.
Next week, the last letter, and the strangest truth in all of this. After everything the fire took, why you would not trade it. I will see you at the summit.