No Shortcut to Becoming

In a world built for ease, what’s lost when we no longer do what’s hard?

This week I spoke at a conference. Someone asked me how we might prepare the next generation for the age of AI.

What skills matter now? How can we encourage more people to become entrepreneurs?

I gave an answer. It wasn’t the wrong one - but it wasn’t the full one.

Later, I realized what I left out.

🏴‍☠️

Before we dive in, a quick update on PIRATE Night.

Things are taking shape. At the end of August, the Rhineland will host a series of great startup events:

• August 26th: VC Lunch in Cologne

• August 27th: Startup Open Air in Bonn

• August 28th: PIRATE Night in Cologne

If you are coming from abroad, aim to be here on the 27th and 28th.

And if there’s enough interest, we’ll cook up something during the day on the 28th too.

Mark your calendars - this will be worth it.

🏴‍☠️

I want my children’s lives to be hard.

Not cruel. Not unsafe. But hard in the way that forms something inside them no shortcut can replicate.

A year back, Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, told a group of students, “I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering.”

He wasn’t being harsh. He was being real. “Greatness comes from character,” he said, “and character is formed out of people who suffered.”

That line resonated because I know what he means.

The Allure of Less Resistance

We spend so much of our lives trying to shield ourselves, and those we care for, from discomfort. And yet, we miss one important thing.

Discomfort is a sign you're expanding, not shrinking.

We live in a time when everything leans toward ease. We optimize. Automate. Streamline. If something takes effort, we redesign it until it doesn’t.

This isn’t new. The industrial age did the same. Power tools, cars, dishwashers - they freed us, extended our reach. But they also weakened certain muscles.

50 years ago, the idea of paying a personal trainer to count your push-ups would’ve seemed absurd. But now, with so much ease built into our lives, we simulate hardship to stay in shape.

Today, AI is doing the same to our minds.

The Mind's New Machines

Just as GPS and navigation apps quietly dull our sense of direction, AI now offers to ease the friction of thought.

It drafts our messages, outlines our ideas, completes our sentences before we finish the question. It’s efficient. It saves time. But friction isn’t always the enemy.

Struggle is the crucible where we grow. It sharpens attention. Builds patience. Teaches nuance.

Growth isn’t found in perfect outcomes - it begins the moment you dare to start without certainty.

When AI removes the struggle - the grind of wrestling with uncertainty, the slow shaping of a rough idea into clarity - we lose more than process. We lose capacity.

What happens when the path to an answer is always immediate?

What becomes of the patience to persist? The wisdom earned from failure? The intuitive leaps born of slow wrestling with complexity?

The Crucible of Becoming

Entrepreneurship reveals this clearly. Success rarely comes from knowing the answer. It comes from learning how to keep going when you don’t.

It’s not the easy wins that shape you. It’s the pivots, the breakdowns, the things that didn’t work - and the person you had to become to keep going anyway.

Skipping these lessons for quick answers is like trying to build muscle without resistance. You can’t.

Those who only seek the destination often miss the transformation that happens along the way - the very transformation that builds character.

Growth starts when discomfort begins.

Pain is life’s feedback loop - not a signal to stop, but an invitation to pay attention.

If we outsource every struggle, we bypass the very process that builds judgment, resilience, and depth.

Tools can help us do more, but they can’t help us become more. Not without effort.

When we consistently skip the struggle, we risk skipping the becoming.

What I Want for My Children

I don’t want my children to know this just as a theory. I want them to feel it. To live it.

I want them to face problems with no quick fix. To learn to argue, fail, and repair without scripts. To develop a strength no algorithm can offer.

To get it wrong. Then, through effort, find their way to better.

That is how resilience is built. That is how grit is developed. It is how we cultivate a strength that prepares for life’s challenges.

Growth and comfort don’t coexist. If they want to build something real, they’ll have to step into resistance - on purpose.

Because true strength doesn’t come from ease. It comes from the slow, often invisible work of doing what’s hard - over and over - until it becomes part of who you are.

That’s not just preparation for entrepreneurship. That’s preparation for life.

Choosing the Harder Road

The tools will keep getting smarter. The world will keep getting faster. But some things don’t change.

There is no substitute for effort.

No algorithm for meaning.

No shortcut to becoming.

In an age of artificial everything, the rarest trait might be something stubbornly human: the willingness to do what’s hard when it matters.

No machine can live your life for you.

And the hardest roads? They’re often the ones that return you to yourself.

Maybe the greatest gift we can offer - whether to our children or to ourselves - is not protection from that road, but the courage to walk it on purpose.

Who knows.

Maybe in ten years, we’ll be hiring personal trainers for the mind - just to remember how to think for ourselves.

🙏

Be kind,

Manuel