The Nights

"One day, my father, he told me, "Son, don't let it slip away" He took me in his arms, I heard him say "When you get older, your wild heart will live for younger days Think of me if ever you're afraid" - The Nights by Avicii

When most people listen to Avicii's song, they probably don't picture the kind of night I just had. Patrick, one of my best friends, is graduating business school and, like me, is working on his new venture -- a new fund with a promising and novel investment thesis. Yesterday at around midnight he called me and jokingly commiserated: "Memorial Day Weekend. No Grill. No Family. Just Akshar and Pat on call again." It was true; it was another night, weekend, weekday, or long weekend -- it didn't matter -- where we were burning the midnight oil, tinkering away on what we believe to be our life's work.

For many, these nights would feel lonely but over the years, I’ve come to appreciate that while we may be alone, we are far from lonely. These nights form a shared tradition from a long lineage of dreamers, past, present, and future. Just like us, there are millions around the world -- builders, artists, writers, entrepreneurs -- living nights just like ours in the dream of bringing something new and beautiful to the world. From the 32 year old writer in Boerum Hill (@brian) to the 16 year old sneaker customizer in Pretoria to the 47 year old entrepreneur in Singapore, we are far from alone. In fact, it is these very nights over centuries past and those that lived them that we can give thanks to the things we love most today. Future generations, too, will owe their joys to these very nights by their contemporaries.

We ought to enjoy these nights, particularly when we are young, for even these nights change in texture over the course of a dreamer’s life. I’ve been fortunate to have ventures work to see how the reckless abandon and creative chaos of the early days give way to structure and risk aversion. It is a bitter irony that in the nights we ought to enjoy the most -- the ones in which we are most free to create -- we often let the freedom turn to stress and anxiety not knowing that when all goes well, we will miss the freedom the most. At the peak of my past ventures, I only wished I could be a beginner again -- and now that I am, I will not make that same mistake twice.

It is my belief that Avicii was speaking of these nights that I have described. When else then in one of them would he have written the song? Perhaps our “wild hearts” he speaks of is our calling to create and contribute to the collective and that when we are older and our ventures are heavy with success, we will harken back to the nights when we were light again.