Growth Hurts

In your life, is there a failure that you have grown to cherish, something that taught you a really important lesson that's changed your life in a very fundamentally positive way?

I guess the first few times that I tried to convince my now wife to date me. She rejected me. That made me that much more focused when when there was actually an opening.

You had success.

I had success.

Now you've got three kids.

And I learned to persevere and I think she thinks it was a good decision. But no, failures I've learned to cherish, Look, Khan Capital failed. At the time, that was incredibly taxing on me. That was about a year and a half before...I had to bleed into our savings for Khan Academy and I had to bleed into the savings even more for that project and at the time I was questioning my self-esteem, who am I, blah blah blah, but honestly if that succeeded, there wouldn't be a Khan Academy. I would've been all in on that.

On your capital firm.

Yeah, on being a hedge fund manager, and you know that wouldn't have been a horrible reality, but it would've been a very different reality from what I'm in. And knowing what I know now, I would definitely pick the reality that I am in. So that was a good failure. I think even those early days of getting rejection, of people turning me down, I mean, I was building muscles then. You know those times when you're really stressed and you're really questioning yourself and you're waking up in the middle of the night, they feel horrible, like really horrible and you don't think your life will ever pick up from those moments, those are actually times when you're growing. Growth hurts.