I’d been hiking for four or five hours by the time my legs started arguing with me. Just me and the mountain — no kids, no wife, no one to keep pace with or talk to. That deep burn in the quads, the kind that makes you start negotiating with yourself. Just a little further. Just to that next ridge. Every step up demanding something from legs that already had nothing left to give.
That’s when the trail split.
One path was wide, smooth, forgiving — the kind where you can catch your breath and coast. The other climbed straight up the face of the mountain, rocky and steep, punishing. I stood there alone longer than I needed to. Because in that moment, tired as I was, I realized this was exactly what life has felt like for me.
We don’t always get to choose what happens to us. But we get to choose which kind of hard we’re willing to embrace. And for whatever reason, I’ve always been drawn to the harder one. Not because I enjoy the suffering, but because I’ve learned that growth only ever seems to live on that side of the fork. Leaving computer engineering for medical school. Picking oncology, a field that never lets you coast on what you learned ten years ago. Building a TIL cell therapy program that didn’t have a blueprint because it barely existed yet. Triple re-boarding in all three specialties nobody required me to do. There were people along the way who told me I couldn’t, wouldn’t, shouldn’t. I never argued with them. I just kept climbing.
But standing at that fork, alone and a little emotional about it, the person I kept thinking about wasn’t me. It was my father.
He came to this country from India in the 1950s. Seventeen years old, alone, no family here, barely a grip on the language or the culture. By every account from people who knew him before, he’d been the talkative one, social. The man I grew up with barely spoke. It took me most of my adult life to understand that a decade of building something from nothing, by yourself, in a country that didn’t make room for you, will take the talking right out of a person. He didn’t just build a life for himself. He changed what was possible for his entire family — my brothers, me, all of it traces back to a kid who got off a plane alone and decided to stay hard at it.
He never once told me it was difficult. He just did it.
About four or five years ago, I was on a plane myself, seatbelt on, about to take off for a speaking engagement, when I got the call. My father had been in an accident. Otherwise healthy, no warning — and it would ultimately take his life. I don’t fully remember standing up. I remember telling the flight attendants I needed off, and them saying we were already pulling from the gate. I said my father was in a tragic accident. They didn’t argue. They just opened the door.
I drove through the night, three or four hours, thinking about all of it. Thirty years earlier he had stepped off a plane into a country he didn’t know, with nothing, to begin the hardest climb of his life. And here I was stepping off one into the worst news of mine. Same family, same instinct — keep moving, one step at a time. You don’t really understand what someone gave up for you until they’re not there to ask anymore. I got to choose my hard, on a mountain, as a form of recreation. He never had that luxury. Everything I’ve ever built stands on a decade of his that nobody applauded and he never once complained about.
Today is the Fourth of July, and I keep thinking there’s a reason this all surfaced now, on this day of all days. Two hundred and fifty years ago, a country chose the hard road too — sacrifice now, uncertainty now, pain now, for something greater than any one person standing at the time. That’s the whole story of this place, when you strip away the music and fireworks. People choosing difficult over easy because the difficult led somewhere worth going. My father’s version wasn’t a declaration or a battlefield. It was a quiet, unglamorous decade of doing the hard thing with no one watching. But it was the same choice.
Back at that fork, I’d taken the steep path without really knowing why. Standing at the summit, alone, I knew then. I choose hard because he chose hard. Because a seventeen-year-old with no map and no safety net decided the difficult road was the only one worth taking, and that decision became the ground that I stand on. He did it with disadvantages, I had no excuse with all the advantages I had.
Today the country celebrates that same kind of choice — sacrifice, uncertainty, a bet on something greater than yourself. I just honor the man who taught it to me first. Grateful, on this day of all days, that I ever had the choice at all.
Happy 4th!
“At the end of the day, this second shift is about more than just work—it’s about building a life with purpose. I believe in the power of showing up fully across every spoke of life—career, family, health, finances, intellect, spirituality, and joy. This space is where I reflect, recalibrate, and keep striving for that delicate, worthwhile balance. I write not just to document the journey, but to remind myself—and maybe you too—that it’s okay to want more, to give more, and to grow through every season.” — st
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