Nothing worth pursuing is free.

I finished Morgan Housel's Same as Ever, and one line has been following me around: nothing worth pursuing is free.

His point is that we treat the cost of good things as merely a malfunction: the stress, the bureaucracy, the hard conversations, the tears. As if something has gone wrong. It hasn't. That's just the fee and it's non-negotiable. The grass looks greener on the other side mostly because it's fertilized with someone else's hidden costs. Every team worth building I've been part of came with a price I didn't want to pay.