Patrick Collison on prioritizing fulfillment over happiness

“Maybe this is the rationalization I tell myself, but when I look back through life on the things I’m most glad I did, I wasn’t exactly happy while doing them. Often I was very stressed out or had to work very hard or whatever. But they’re the things post-hoc that brought the most fulfillment.”

The Stripe co-founder continues:

“There’s a rich literature here so I won’t dive too deeply into it, but I do think happiness is a tricky concept to pin down. Is it happiness in the moment? Is it the sense that you have a year later looking back? Language is squishy and it’s not specifically defined, but generally-speaking, I think the better utility function is fulfillment.”

Patrick reflects on his experience building Stripe:

“It was not especially happy. We were incredibly aware of all the ways in which the product was severely deficient and all the challenges we faced. There was no ‘fintech’ category back then — it was sort of two teenagers trying to compete with PayPal, which many people told as was not an especially promising avenue to pursue. So I wasn’t especially happy per se, but it did feel fulfilling. I enjoyed working with John [Collison] and the people we subsequently hired. It was really fun working with the customers we were serving, which were these businesses doing all these wonderful things with really smart people. And it felt like if it worked, it could be consequential in the world. I don’t know what it feels like to be a scientist, but I’m guessing you have this big question and you’re pursuing all these avenues to try to better understand it. And I’m guessing that day-to-day you’re not especially happy because most of your experiments don’t work. Perhaps there’s some analog there where it still feels in some sense meaningful.”

Full video: Y Combinator “Running Your Company by Patrick Collison“ (Oct 2018)