What is your ice cream cone?

A few days ago I was sitting down with a friend and mentor of mine, Jonathan Beninson, riffing on many aspects of the founder journey when he shared an unexpected question with me: “Vlad, right now what do you think it’s your ice cream cone?” Never have I been asked this question before, so I was curious to understand what he meant by that. He proceeded to explain it to me, and I’ll be paraphrasing and expanding on that topic here, borrowing the core idea.

When you were little, you may have gone with your parents to some sort of fair or seaside and received an ice cream cone. In some unfortunate situation, that ice cream cone may have fallen to the ground. At that point in time, you felt like the world was ending, that every joy of life had been stripped away from you and the most important thing, the ice cream cone, is now gone, never to return again. At the age of 3 or 4 years old, that is your truth, and it would be silly of us to use our adult judgment to dismiss the feeling that kid is having. At that age, with all the given information and life experience, losing the cone of ice cream is the end.

Obviously it is not. And depending on the parent and their means, that ice cream cone may or may not have been repurchased. With time, the kid learned that the ice cream cone is an object that can be acquired and lost, something we consume that doesn’t have a meaningful impact on our life. Something we should not stress about. In retrospect, everything is obvious. In that moment, our subjective experience is our truth as long as we don’t challenge it.

That said, as we grow, the ice cream cone simply evolves to be other things. In adolescence, it may be the first heartbreak. In college, it may be the failed interview at the coveted internship. In adulthood, it may be the missed promotion or the reduction in force that puts you back on the job market. At any given moment, we may be dealing with something that feels extraordinarily important because we choose to give it that much meaning.

As founders, it is very easy to find such things, simply because the velocity of life is so much faster than that of the ordinary human. By experiencing a lot more moments per unit of time, it is statistically obvious that we shall get attached to the outcome of more events or decisions. We will be given many more opportunities to drop the ice cream cone and react to it. How we do so it’s entirely dependent on our ability to objectively assess the situation and detach our immediate emotional response from it. The situation itself is neither good nor bad, it just is. We choose to view it one way or the other and, as a result, stress about it or go on with our lives.

There should be no period of our life in which we don’t ask ourselves “what is my ice cream cone right now?” And then proceed to detach from the outcome. With the exception of our health and the health of our loved ones, very few things matter that much in the world. So let’s find the ice cream cone and teach our inner kid that everything is ok, with or without it.