The Beauty in Hardship
August 22, 2022
Introduction
The other day, with a couple weeks left in my summer internship at Coinbase, an old friend called to ask how my experience working in NYC had been — whether everything had gone smoothly. Instinctively, in spite of the heavy bags under my eyes and the cloud of uncertainty shrouding my work, I responded yes.
As my time here comes to an end, I've realized I want to amend that answer. Not because it’s wrong, but because it deserves more nuance. This post is my attempt to provide that.
Rough Seas
To be clear, I didn’t lie — not intentionally anyway. I’ve quite enjoyed my time here. In fact, over these three months my appreciation for the city has grown immensely. But, though I could describe my summer in many ways, smooth is definitely (and fortunately — I’ll get to that later) not one of them.
In truth, upon reflection, I can say with confidence that this summer has been tremendously challenging. For context, let me walk you through my month of June.
6/2: Less than a day after moving into my three-month sublease, and 4 days before my scheduled start date, Coinbase announces a company-wide hiring freeze and begins rescinding accepted offers.
6/5: After spending 72 hours pacing around the third floor apartment that I wasn’t sure I could afford anymore, a new subject line appeared in my inbox: “New hire onboarding itinerary!” — my first deep breath in three days. On the bright side, I got a good night’s sleep before my first day of work :)
6/9: I’m assigned to a new project due to shifting business priorities. Rather than launching Coinbase-specific Cosmos Zones and Avalanche Subnets with the Protocol team (an experimental project I’d been looking forward to for weeks), I’m placed on a team of senior engineers to work on the Bridge Interoperability Platform.
6/14: Coinbase lays off 1,100 employees, 18% of total staff, bringing forth a brief wave of frantic Slack messages and phone calls before interns are confirmed safe (for the second time in ten days). Half the upcoming coffee chats I scheduled with folks across the company are auto-wiped from my calendar.
6/20: Multiple clients of my blockchain development studio (which I may write about in the future) pull out from deals over a span of four days due to fearful market conditions, marking what seemed to be an abrupt and unceremonious end to its operations.
At this point, you may understandably wonder how I could consider these circumstances fortunate. Well, they do say smooth seas never made a skilled sailor. In my experience, time under tension has always resulted in growth. Because of this, over the years I’ve built up a (hopefully not-so masochistic) inclination towards (what I like to convince myself is) controlled adversity as a forcing function for self-improvement. Of course, I'll acknowledge I'm allowed to do this in large part due to the dumb luck of being born into the abundant roaring 2010s, a privilege that I try my best to make the most of. Regardless, this summer brought enough adversity for second and third servings even after I was full.
But, in the wake of rough seas came focus. A deep focus rooted in an instinct to survive and a heightened desire to maximize the opportunity before me.
The Beauty
Over the last couple months, I’ve felt incredibly and surprisingly inspired, which has been a great boost to my productivity. I've been able to:
Organize "Crypto Talks", a company-wide fireside chat series, with Antonio Juliano (dYdX founder), Hayden Adams (Uniswap founder), and more leaders across the blockchain space.
Finish out development for two new projects that I sourced and partnered with through my development studio.
Build out end-to-end deposit & withdrawal workflows for the first three productized cross-chain bridges on Coinbase Wallet, enabling users to send + receive crypto assets across blockchains through a single click on their mobile apps, specifically Ethereum to Polygon (which just launched!), Ethereum to Avalanche, and Ethereum to Optimism.
Events that felt supremely disappointing in the moment (like my intern-project reassignment) turned out to be transformative learning experiences. And though usage metrics likely won’t be hitting all-time highs for a couple years, I’m undoubtedly leaving this internship more bullish on the future of this company, and blockchain as a whole, than I entered. And it's due largely to the inspired intensity and (mostly) unwavering persistence that I saw take hold across an org of ~4,000 employees in the face of adversity.
Closing Thoughts
Comfort creates complacency. Hardship creates focus. This summer I’ve seen this principle unfold first hand. Though straightforward enough in theory, seeing (and being a part of) it up close was shockingly profound.
As a closing note in case I haven’t made it clear, I definitely don't mean to glorify adversity. In fact, I briefly questioned the merits of this mindset after contemplating the true role that an overly relentless pursuit of (measurable) self-improvement plays in a fulfilled life. But, I think that’s a thought for another day (or perhaps another decade…)
In any case, the past three months have been rife with challenges, but rich in progress, and I think that's important for me to take note of and commemorate.
So to my friend — I wouldn’t exactly say it went smoothly, but there’s no doubt it was a summer well spent.