You run, eat, sleep, walk around - that's how life is. You don't get complicated. The moment you get complicated it distracts your mind.

Arriving in the States, I had the feeling of being thrown into an ocean. The ocean was full of knowledge, culture, and opportunities, and the choice was clear: I could either learn to swim or sink. The culture was foreign, the language was difficult, but my hopes were high. I did not speak or write English fluently, and I did not know much about western culture in general, or American culture in particular.

Now I try to protect one hour in the morning and one in the afternoon where I turn off Slack, and I don't check email. I might read, or write in a journal, or just go for a walk. It's become one of the most important parts of my day. It's when I'm most creative, and when I hit on ideas that can take the company in new directions.

And when things get tough, this is what you should do. Make good art. I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Somebody on the Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before? Make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, and eventually time will take the sting away, but that doesn’t matter. Do what only you do best. Make good art.

And into the darkness I said, “What happened?” and a woman’s voice said, “It was a car bomb,” and I collapsed into darkness again, but with a sense of euphoria. I’d survived.

I’d been introduced to Freud through all this because I couldn’t understand why is it so difficult to be brave. There was something inside me that wanted to collaborate all the time with the people who wanted to destroy me, and I was searching for it, and I found there was a thing called the unconscious that everybody has. And you’ve got to be in touch with the unconscious to understand a lot of your behavior. And I read through volume after volume after volume of the collected works of Sigmund Freud.