Someone said this to me once before I left for a trip. I think it was meant as a joke. But I have not been able to stop thinking about it since.
Good luck. Have fun. Don't die.
Seven words. That is the entire operating manual for being alive.
Good Luck
Luck is real and pretending it is not is one of the most destructive lies successful people tell.
You were born somewhere. To someone. With a body that either cooperates or fights you. Into an economy that was either expanding or contracting. Into a culture that either rewards your natural tendencies or punishes them.
None of that was your decision.
The startup world has a strange relationship with luck. We worship "hustle" and "grit" and "10x thinking" as if outcomes are purely a function of effort. They are not. Effort is necessary but insufficient. You can do everything right and still lose. You can do most things wrong and still win.
This is not nihilism. It is the opposite. Once you accept that luck plays a massive role, two things happen. First, you stop being cruel to yourself when things do not work. Not every failure is a character defect. Sometimes the timing was wrong, the market was not ready, the person you needed to meet was in a different city.
Second, you start being more generous with others. That person who is struggling - maybe they are not lazy. Maybe their dice landed differently than yours.
The correct response to luck is not passivity. It is preparation. You cannot control which opportunities appear, but you can control whether you are ready when they do. Read widely. Build skills that compound. Stay in the game long enough for variance to work in your favor.
Good luck is what happens when preparation meets a universe that does not care about your plans. Wish people luck. Mean it. You are wishing them the one thing that effort alone cannot produce.
Have Fun
This one sounds obvious until you look at how most people actually live.
I know founders who have not enjoyed a single day of building their company. They started because they thought it would make them rich, or important, or free. Three years in, they are none of those things, and now they are also miserable.
I know professionals who optimized so hard for the "right" career that they forgot to check whether they liked any of it. They have the title, the salary, the apartment. They are bored out of their minds.
Fun is not frivolous. Fun is signal. When you are having fun, you are engaged. When you are engaged, you are creative. When you are creative, you produce things that actually matter. The best work I have ever done felt like play. Not easy - play can be hard, frustrating, consuming. But it had that quality of wanting to keep going. Of losing track of time. Of being pulled forward rather than pushed.
If you are building something and it feels like dragging a boulder uphill every single day, that is not discipline. That is a sign you are building the wrong thing, or building the right thing in the wrong way.
This does not mean avoid hard work. Hard work in service of something that excites you is one of the best feelings available to a human being. Hard work in service of someone else's definition of success is slow death.
The question is not "am I working hard?" The question is "would I do this even if nobody was watching?"
Fun is also a sustainability strategy. Burnout does not come from working too much. It comes from working too much on things you do not care about. I have pulled 16-hour days that left me energized and 4-hour days that left me destroyed. The difference was never the hours. It was the alignment.
Have fun. Not as a reward for doing the serious stuff. As the serious stuff itself.
Don't Die
The most underrated advice in the world.
In business, "don't die" means stay solvent. Keep the lights on. Do not take the bet that kills the company if it fails. Most startups do not get outcompeted - they run out of money. They run out of time. They die.
The boring, unsexy truth of entrepreneurship is that survival is the strategy. If you are still in the game next year, you have already beaten most of your competitors who quit, pivoted into something unrelated, or imploded.
In life, "don't die" means the same thing scaled up. Protect your health. Do not sacrifice your body for your ambitions. A dead founder ships nothing. A burned-out founder ships garbage.
It also means: do not take unnecessary existential risks. Not every hill is worth dying on. Not every fight needs to be yours. Not every opportunity is worth the downside.
I used to think courage meant saying yes to everything scary. Now I think courage means knowing which scary things are worth it and walking away from the rest. The people who change the world are not the ones who take every risk. They are the ones who survive long enough to take the right ones.
Don't die also has a deeper layer. Do not let the parts of you that are alive - your curiosity, your capacity for wonder, your ability to be moved by something beautiful - do not let those die either. The world is very good at killing those things slowly. Through cynicism, through routine, through the gradual replacement of "I wonder" with "I know."
Stay alive in every sense of the word.
The Whole Thing
Good luck. Have fun. Don't die.
It is a philosophy of humility, joy, and survival. Accept what you cannot control. Find work and people and places that make you feel something. And above all, stay in the game.
I cannot think of better advice for starting a company, a relationship, a creative project, or a Tuesday.
Good luck out there.