I’m not a particularly religious person by the standard definition. I’ll haul myself to the Christmas Eve service at the church I grew up in when I’m in town, primarily for nostalgia. They have a brass band play Christmas music, and by gum, that’s a requirement for me.

I have, however, always been interested in philosophy. Before you glaze over, to me, philosophy is just asking, “What is X, anyway?”

What is strategy? What is success?

See how easy it is?

The crossover between the two is called theology. Additionally, there are several theological concepts that you may not encounter in secular philosophy. What is faith? What is joy? What is grace? And not merely religiously, what can we learn from these concepts even in a secular context?

I recently was in a somewhat spiritual mood. I've arranged this AI prompt, which you’re free to use (make sure to use it on a chat platform that maintains a record of your conversations, such as ChatGPT).

"In many near death experiences, people report that they remembered that they CHOSE their lives. All their hardships, all their trials, they knew what was coming and signed up for it. They also say life is about a lesson.

Given all you know about me, why do you think I chose my life? What lesson did I think I needed to learn?"

The LLM decided, based on the conversations we had most often, that I needed to learn more about grace. It was an interesting question, taken with the grain of salt that it was from auto-complete on steroids.

What is Grace?

I often come up with my own answers to things that feel right. Grace to me had something to do with stochastic events. I don’t like the term “undeserved” either, as it is often associated with the concept of grace. To me, undeserved forgiveness is a form of mercy. We have two words, mercy and grace, so I want them to mean different things.

Something stochastic. Something random. Like being lucky. But something ethically deserved. A good thing happening to a good person, maybe. But random! Not systematic. Systematic good things happening to good people is called justice.

People like to use the term undeserved but what I think they mean by that is mechanically impossible. As in, there was nothing people could do to earn the grace. It was a lucky break in their favor. But what does make them deserving is that they did everything possible they could.

Perhaps grace is achieving the impossible by doing everything possible?

In this way, grace is a raft saving you from drowning. You have treaded water as long as you could; you tried everything you could. Then the universe conspires to say, “Not this one, not today,” and saves your life.

Startups

Kissinger said, “The guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.”

This is tantamount to saying the resistance fighter wins on a matter of grace. The resistance fighter stays in the fight long enough for the universe to lose interest in defeating her, or long enough for allies to finally be moved by her ethical fight.

Startups are the same. Most startups end because the founders give up. They end due to a lack of energy and initiative, rather than strictly cash flow issues. Businesses die because people give up on them.

How do startups succeed in this model, then? By grace. To build a company, in a way, is to do the impossible. We see it done all the time, so empirically, we know it’s possible. Still, we also confront criticism after criticism that, in our case, in this business at this time, defeat is inevitable.

And yet, we keep on treading water.

Luck favors the well-prepared.