My partner and I are almost at nine years of marriage, with ten years coming into view. We've known each other for twelve. Looking back across this period:

  • Nine years ago I was a company employee; now I'm a founder and CEO
  • Nine years ago I was single; now I'm a family of four with two sons

Those are the visible external changes. But I believe the internal changes have been far greater. One of them is a skill I'd call "the art of staying for the long haul."

"Why would staying for the long haul require a skill?" That question might not land for some people. I suspect the me of nine years ago would have reacted the same way.

I used to be a much more decisive person. By which I mean I had (much more strongly than now) the following tendencies:

  • Clarify my values clearly, map them against others, identify where they fit and where they don't
  • When values don't fit, create distance first
  • Or push — immediately — for either myself or the other person to change

These tendencies had value for "protecting myself" and "avoiding conflict." But they created many problems.

Here's the thing: every person is a bundle of countless values. When you try to connect with someone, some values align and others don't — that's normal. I lacked the capacity to hold this simple truth, and I was brittle and clumsy in response to it. Somewhere inside me was the delusion that someone would "understand me completely," that "our values would be perfectly aligned." That was a fantasy.

How many times did a single misalignment of values lead me to create distance from a whole person? Looking back, I can see I killed many chances to know people more deeply.

When the other person is a complete stranger, that stance doesn't cause too much damage. If someone at work is difficult, you transfer or change jobs. In private life, you just stop texting. The relationship ends cleanly.

But what if the person with the misaligned values is the person you've decided to spend your life with? Or your own child? For a founder: what if it's your co-founder, or a team member you yourself hired and brought on?

In none of these cases is cutting the connection quickly either easy or right.

"Sharing core values" is often what brings two people together in the first place — what makes someone choose to marry, or choose to start a project together.

But values shift in everyone. And the capacity to "share" also shifts. Over time, difficult collisions that are hard to accept become inevitable. That, I can say with confidence, is guaranteed.

In my case, over these ten years, there have been multiple instances where my partner and I couldn't "share" well. Life priorities. Stance toward work. Stance toward parenting. All important things. (When one arose in early 2019 I even wrote a blog post about it: "On Loving.")

In the early years, these moments hit me hard:

  • Can we make this work going forward?
  • Is it okay to keep being together?

Thoughts that essentially denied the marriage and the living arrangement. They came more than once.

But repeating these cycles, I noticed something: my partner's stance was clearly different from mine. She was practicing a skill — "living with the gap, without rushing to resolve it."

This skill requires one foundational premise: a commitment to a lifetime together.

If your goal is short-term happiness — optimizing for the present moment — then my old "decisive" stance is the right answer. But life, while it seems short, is long. Ourselves and everyone around us keep changing. In that reality, committing a lifetime to a relationship is a risky act. But marriage and founding are, by nature, acts that take exactly that risk. And taking the risk is what makes "the art of the long haul" worth developing.

The art of the long haul is the opposite of my old stance:

  • Keep the long-term partnership in view
  • Be patient — able to wait for the other person, yourself, or the environment to change and be accepted
  • Tolerate ambiguity

Again: every person is a bundle of values. The longer you stay together, the more of those values you encounter, and the more potential misalignments there are. If you tried to end the relationship at every misalignment, what would you be left with in the end?

Of course I'm not consistently good at this. I'm still developing it.

But through this marriage-as-partnership, my orientation toward everything — the time frame I think in — has slowly, incrementally shifted toward the longer view. That shift has carried into work too, and I think it's reflected in the identity of 10X as a company.

What any of us can accomplish in a lifetime is genuinely small. I think it's a deep human instinct to want at least one masterpiece — one relationship, one piece of work, one business. "Commit a lifetime to it; once committed, don't waver; tolerate it and change it slowly; move forward." To reach that place, the skill of managing your inner world — your heart — may be the most important thing of all.

That, at least, is what I keep learning from this partnership called marriage.

This piece won't be useful to many people, I suspect. But it surfaced in my mind and I wanted to write it down.