Like Fine Wine
Someone told me long back: as a man, if you’ve got your shit together, your tomorrow is always on an upward trajectory.
You’ll be richer. Wiser. Hotter. A real man doesn’t fade; he ages like fine wine.
Walking through life isn’t a straight path. It’s thorny, twisted, full of valleys of uncertainty. Most days it feels like you’re stumbling blind. But with time, clarity kicks in. You learn, sometimes by picking up knowledge, but mostly by screwing up. Mistakes are the tuition life charges, and introspection is the silent mechanism inside you that keeps score even when you’re not aware of it.
Here’s the truth: everyone screws up. The only question is, are you repeating the same mistakes, or is the surface area of your mistakes expanding? If you’re not looping, if each new blunder is in a different dimension, you’re doing fine. In fact, the more you screw up, the better. Compare a boring 50-year-old who’s repeated the same small mistakes forever versus a successful man in his 40s who’s burned himself on a thousand fronts. I’ll take the latter every time.
The bottom line: screw around. Get punched in the face. Get back up. Pace with all your might. Tomorrow’s sun rises just to give you another shot.
Men and Companies Are the Same Beast
Every business is a living organism, no different from a man. Both survive through experimentation, failure, and resilience. Apple, Microsoft, Google all have graveyards of billion-dollar projects that never went the way they first imagined. Same with men: Jobs, Trump, Masa Son, they’ve all been burned.
Without risk, there is no life. Life itself is born of risk and chance. Going all in, doubling down like your life depends on it, always pays dividends. Maybe not in the form you expected, but energy never disappears. Effort compounds. What’s meant for you will find you, but only if you had the guts to initiate.
And if it doesn’t work? Quit that expedition if you must. Pause. Pivot. But never think your sweat went unrecorded. The books are kept. Your intentions are tallied. Nothing vanishes.
Companies are imagined and executed by men. And just like men, they thrive only by risking, failing, and rising again.
Pain Is the Forge
Every new day comes with its own ambush. Problems out of nowhere. Blows you didn’t see coming. But pain isn’t wasted. It chisels you into something fit for the game.
Jensen Huang said it best at Stanford. He wished pain and suffering upon the graduates. Why? Because pain forges men of character. Pain makes rulers. Pain makes leaders.
The weights in the gym transform your body. The weights of life transform your mind. Neither gets easier, but you get stronger. You get more skilled. You stack XP.
When you zoom out, it’s all a game of skewed returns: risk, pain tolerance, resilience. You’ll screw up, but you’ll iterate. You’ll level up. And yes, at each new level the game resets, harder, bigger, scarier. But when you look back, it feels like child’s play.
Along the way you’ll make, lose, and remake fortunes, people, influence, knowledge, even looks. Nothing is linear. It’s spikes, dips, windfalls, and crashes. But if you stay in the game, consistently, fearlessly, you rack up XP. And that XP makes your tomorrow inevitable: richer, smarter, wiser, hotter.
You’re a man. You age like fine wine. Not because time is kind, but because you’ve been forged by fire.
-G Chola