For this chapter’s profile, I didn’t have to think long about who in my life knows all about embracing the suck. Kamal’s name jumped up all by itself. It’s not that the suck in his life has been so much worse than anyone else’s. It’s what he’s done with the suck that makes him a natural for this topic.
Kamal joined the army at eighteen after a year of college and served as an 11 Bravo (infantry soldier) in the Tenth Mountain Division. After the army, he did trauma research in upstate New York emergency departments while attending courses at the University of Rochester, with the intention of becoming an emergency physician. Instead, he ended up moving to Silicon Valley, where he helped build a company named Healtheon, which became WebMD about the time of the dot-com boom. By the time Kamal left WebMD, he was running its home page. This was a big deal. If you were the guy in charge of the home page, you were one of the most important people there. At this point, it’s safe to say that Kamal was hot stuff in the tech business world.
He briefly did some consulting for the pharmaceutical industry, which paid well, but it didn’t take long to realize, as he puts it, “how that sucked my soul.” He split and spent some time traveling—hiked the Himalayas and meditated with Tibetan monks, trekked 550 miles across Spain with Hemingway paperbacks in his back pocket, spent some time living in Paris. Eventually, he returned to Silicon Valley, where he started to work with tech companies again, even starting a few himself.
Meanwhile, Kamal was also moonlighting as an aspiring writer. He had a passion for writing and had been working away at it throughout his adventures. He didn’t just read Hemingway while on his world travels; he read him over and over, poring through the prose like a World War II code breaker, reverse-engineering every paragraph, every line, every phrase, trying to understand how Papa did it.
The whole time he was writing, he was also trying to get published. And failing. In fact, he couldn’t even get an agent.
“I would get a run of rejection letters and be depressed for ten days,” he says, “then pull myself together and say, ‘Okay, now what? I can quit. Or I can become a better writer, rewrite everything, send it to a new batch of agents, and see if I get in this time.’”
Each time he sent his fiction out to a new series of literary agents, he got a new round of rejections. Eventually, the rejection letters got better: from typewritten to handwritten, to phone calls, to meetings. Finally, he succeeded in signing with an agent. He showed the agent a novel he’d written, and the guy said, “I can give it a try, but you’re an unknown writer; no publisher’s going to be interested.”
Kamal put his writing aside and, for the moment, forgot about it.
At this point, something interesting happened: One of those Silicon Valley companies he started did really well. Really well. And then the company blew up, taking all his money with it. The timing was terrible. He had just broken off a relationship. A close friend had recently died.
As you’ve probably guessed, this is where the “suck” part starts.
When Kamal’s company fell apart, so did Kamal. He had been doing the classic entrepreneur thing for years, which is to say, working like a maniac without ever taking a break. Now the break took him. His health plummeted. The doctors he consulted could do nothing for him. He got worse. Some days he was so weak he could barely get around, and after only a few minutes outside he’d have to go back to bed.
Now, at the bottom of his pit, barely able to get out of bed, he decided to embrace the suck. Rather than try to climb out of the hole he’d dug himself into, rather than struggle to escape where he’d ended up, he made a radical decision: to put every one of the few ounces of energy he had left into acceptance. More than acceptance, in fact: love.
“I decided to love myself,” he says. He spent the next few days, then weeks, pursuing a single-minded program of inner work focused on that singular idea: love yourself.
As he pulled out of his nosedive, the writer in him came back to life, and he wrote a short book about his process, which he titled Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It. He didn’t even try to pitch this one to an agent; he simply published it himself on Amazon.
He had to work up the courage to push Publish. The idea of putting his little book out into the world was terrifying.
“Here I was, a complete failure, no money, I was going to have to go get a job, and I’m writing about the power of loving yourself? All my Silicon Valley peers would laugh me out of the room. It would destroy my career.”
But he did it anyway.
Within a month, it was the No. 1 book in Amazon’s Self-Help category. The book became a blockbuster bestseller.
“Those years of rejection letters were probably the best gift I ever got,” says Kamal. It was that decade of writing and rewriting, striving to internalize Hemingway’s economic, understated style, that taught him to write his story in such simple prose that it would appeal to a wide audience.
It wasn’t just the suck of Kamal’s epic collapse that he embraced. It was all those years of rejection slips, more than a decade of continuous feedback telling him he was failing; it was embracing that suck that gave him the tools he needed to create his ultimate success.
Since the book came out, Kamal has received thousands of e-mails from people telling him how reading it has changed their lives. “I got one from a seventy-two-year-old woman from the Isle of Man in the U.K., another from a sixteen-year-old girl in Ukraine,” he says. The ones that really amaze him are the ones from older people, contacting him to say how after reading his book, they’re having positive thoughts for the first time in their lives.
“I hear from a lot of men who’ve read my book, which in self-help is just unheard of. That surprised a lot of publishers,” he adds, “but it doesn’t surprise me.”
With the success of Love Yourself, suddenly Kamal was in demand; rather than him chasing down an agent, now publishers were courting him. They wanted him to do another Love Yourself book, something else in the self-help field. He wouldn’t do it. He had followed Love Yourself with the more meditative Live Your Truth, and that had been a fulfilling experience. But now he wanted to go beyond the self-help genre. He wanted to step it up, take it to the next level. To grow. So he took the better part of a year off to hole up and write a novel. Rebirth: A Fable of Love, Forgiveness, and Following Your Heart came out in January 2017. It’s a hell of a read.
When I told Kamal we wanted to include this profile of him in a chapter called “Embrace the Suck,” he said, “I’ve heard that phrase before. For me, though, it’s not even the suck; it’s just, your best moments are when you know you’ve given your all. Whether it’s a product you built, or something like writing that you set out to do, or you’re coaching your kid, whatever it is, you gave your all.”
• • •
That’s my cue. Kamal’s comment about “coaching your kid” is where I leave his story and pick mine back up. Because of all the roles I’ve ever had, from search-and-rescue swimmer to SEAL platoon sniper to NSW sniper school course master to media CEO, none has been as important to me as the role of father.
From 2012 on, while I was working to build SOFREP and Hurricane Group from start-up into a multimillion-dollar media business, I also pursued the path of rebuilding my relationship with my kids’ amazing mother. Divorce sucks. You can try to run away from it. We have embraced it.
She has since remarried—a solid, terrific guy—and they now have the most beautiful little girl together. My daughter finally has a sister to help compete with her brothers. Our kids are doing incredibly well, and I spend more time with them than anyone ever imagined I would or could. They are strong and well-adjusted kids, healthy and happy, in large part because their mom and I get along and are aligned in our common goals around the family.
I’m so proud of them and the amazing people they are becoming.