Hello lovey humans,

Some people wake up because the life they built falls apart. Mike woke up at his dear friend's funeral. This is Mike’s story.

The Achievement Machine

For the first fifty years of his life, Mike Hirshland built the kind of résumé that makes other accomplished people feel like they haven’t tried hard enough. First in his class through law school. Clerk on the Supreme Court. Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Then a hard pivot into venture capital, where he backed and incubated companies you’ve almost certainly heard of and used. Instagram, TaskRabbit, WordPress. In 2011, he started his own firm and went on to successfully raise five funds.

Mike was, by any measure, very good at the game. The problem was that the game had become the only thing. He was the kind of person who measured his worth by what he could point to on a shelf. And the shelf was full.

The Poem That Changed Everything

In 2016, Mike attended the memorial service for a mentor and dear friend. He was sitting in the audience when the author Colum McCann read John O’Donohue’s poem For a New Beginning. What happened next, Mike can only describe as an out-of-body experience. Mike says he didn’t hear McCann reading. He heard his dead friend speaking directly to him. Just the two of them in the room. His mentor, reciting these words as if they were instructions:

For Mike, that last line landed like a verdict. Your soul senses the world that awaits you. Mike sat in his chair, stunned, and felt something he hadn’t expected: not grief, but recognition. His soul did sense something. It had been sensing it for a long time. He just hadn’t been quiet enough to hear it.

The Void with No Name

Mike was divorced. His kids were grown. He had dedicated an enormous portion of his life to work. In this moment, he could suddenly see how much of his identity and self-worth had been staked on external measures. Measures that now felt hollow.

The question that surfaced was not a comfortable one: Beneath my résumé, who am I, really? What is the source of my worth to myself and to others? He didn’t have an answer. But he had, for the first time, an overwhelming need to find one.

A few months later, Mike found himself at another memorial service for another close friend. He began sharing with a mutual acquaintance what he was feeling; the emptiness, the pull toward something he couldn’t yet name. That acquaintance listened carefully and then, with the kind of quiet knowingness that changes lives, offered an introduction to a Buddhist meditation school in Boston. Mike said yes.

Ten Years of Sitting Still

That introduction launched what has now been a decade-long journey of Buddhist meditation study. This is not just a phase. Not as a productivity hack or a wellness accessory. As a daily, sustained, serious practice of uncovering what Mike thinks of as the person who exists underneath the achievements, the titles, the funds raised, the companies backed. His essential self.

Bit by bit, the void began to fill. Not with more accomplishments, but with awareness. With presence. With the slow recognition that worth doesn’t come from what you can point to. It comes from what you can sit with. The school eventually asked Mike to train as a meditation teacher. He has now been teaching for three years.

What the Other Side Looks Like

Mike is still a practicing venture capitalist. He hasn’t burned his résumé or moved to a monastery. But he knows where his future lies: in deepening his meditation practice, in continuing to uncover and align his life with his essential self, and in sharing what he’s learned with as many people as possible.

The thing we like most about Mike’s story is that it’s not a rejection of what came before. Those things were the wisdom creating moments. It was the raw material. The finished work is what you do once you stop performing long enough to ask what’s actually true. Mike’s mentor gave him that permission from beyond the grave, through the voice of a poet.

Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning.

He did. He is. And he’s just getting started.

Mike will be co-facilitating the Second Harvest retreat in Jamestown, RI this June. You can find him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikehirshland/​

More stories like this soon.

— Richard & Devon