There's a cost of ownership here and it's bigger than most people think. You see the success stories, the dramatizations ...<p>Very few entrepreneurs are able to let go. At 5 p.m. At 3 a.m. On the weekends. On your wedding day.<p>It can consume you, particularly if you've tied its success directly to your ego.<p>Hard for me to not think about the late nights with the laptop. Even after getting married. Even after having a kid. Being tired as hell and not playing with the kid. Not taking the wife on a date in years.<p>Lot of success stories. Lot of untold cautionary tales.
I agree with this article, from a slightly different perspective.<p>I’m a solo founder, company started 2015, went through accelerator, VC funding, etc.<p>There’s a certain level of emotional stress I can handle, and with everything that goes into making a startup succeed, I was right at my limit for multiple years.<p>Looking back (with my startup profitable, stable, running well), the thing I hate thinking about most is simply that I’ve lost 4 years of my 20’s that I could have used dating, finding “the one”.<p>Now I’m 28, still not “too late” by any measure, but now in “catch up” mode as far as dating goes.<p>For many founders, the same applies to becoming disconnected with family and friends. Founders endure an enormous amount of stress, and the simplest way to cope (when you have the mindset “startup over everything”) is to simplify and strip one’s life of everything outside your startup, which I absolutely don’t recommend, but am guilty of doing and I think is a not so uncommon thing amongst founders as a whole.<p>Maybe it’s not emotional debt in the same way as technical debt, but there is a time debt that results from prioritizing 1 thing so highly, and pushing all else to the side, often years on end. When you come around the other side and realize it 3-4 years later, it’s difficult.
It seems to me we are doing something really wrong if people have so very much emotional baggage from their success.<p>I saw some TV show where some guy said he flew more than a hundred missions in the Air Force and was shot at in all of them. He went into commercial real estate after he left the Air Force. He figured it would be less nerve wracking than that.<p>With nerves of steel, he made a killing.<p>I've spent plenty of time in therapy and journaling and what not to deal with serious trauma in my life. It's a valuable skill to have.<p>But I have some trouble imagining that business success is something I would deem to be some heavy emotional burden to bear.<p>I'm not trying to be dismissive. I'm trying hard to avoid saying something like "First World Problems." But I will suggest that if you are finding it hugely emotionally burdensome, you should make an effort to get some perspective because these really are good problems to have overall and many people live with much worse and absolutely didn't choose it.
People give all kinds of wrong advice when you start out:
Take risks when you're young.
Fail fast, break things.<p>Here's the reality I've experienced as a startup founder. Its not the holy truth, but its been my life and my experiences.<p>If you shoot an arrow even a few degrees off-center, it hits somewhere far from the board.<p>Similarly the decisions you take early on are so much more critical to your life.<p>As an Indian student these are all of the decisions you take:<p>Age 15: Science, Commerce, Arts<p>Age 17: Medical, Engineering<p>Age 18: Computer Science, Electrical, Mechanical, Civil engineering etc<p>Age 22: US Masters or Local Job<p>Guess what?<p>If you want to realistically be a millionaire by 37-38 you have to take 5 correct decisions in a row (Science, Engineering, CS, Masters).<p>You have to do 5 very difficult things to be a Google level engineer.<p>Even if you do four out of five correct after 20 years your life will be in a far lower orbit with respect to finances. Its sad but true.<p>This is why you should do your startup after you clear this early minefield of difficult decisions. Once you can comfortably have a good job at your whim. I'd advise people to startup only after 30.<p>And remember, one misstep and the outcome can be wildly different after 20 years!
I don't entirely agree with the concept. Going through stressful situations can either hack away at your being or it can help make you a more informed and resilient person.<p>Pain can either be useful or useless. Physical exercise is painful. That's useful pain. Falling down and breaking your hip is useless pain.<p>Many of the stressful and painful situations in starting a company are actually extremely valuable life lessons. Learning how to continue after hearing "no" multiple times, criticism and doubt, continuing to be productive despite uncertainty. All of these traits can really only be developed through trial by fire.<p>There are some emotional situations though that are useless. The pain teaches you little to nothing. Even these situations can teach us acceptance over the things we can't control.<p>I believe pain is necessary to feel to grow. You have to take the time to absorb it properly though or else it can destroy you. The only way you can build emotional debt is by trying to forget about it, shoving it into a tiny box in your brain until it explodes out. If you take the time to self reflect and even just acknowledge pain, allowing yourself to experience sadness, you can better yourself in a way impossible without it.
To the extent that you're anti-fragile the sign flips and emotional labor leaves behind a credit balance. To a candle flame the wind is an existential threat but if you're a bonfire the wind can make you an inferno.<p>That's Nassim Taleb's spin. Nietzsche would say that which does not kill you makes you stronger. Neither of which is very helpful if it does blow out your candle.<p>Technical debt can't so easily be converted to credit with an attitude adjustment, breaking the metaphor.
Any serious investigation of stress and how to cope with it will lead to a conversation about activities that energize you, and activities that soothe. Pairing these with stressful events (especially ones you can schedule) can take the edge off. Self-soothing becomes problematic when it is unacknowledged and thus unregulated. Like binging on whatever ice cream is in the frigde after a hard day at work or a difficult conversation with your partner, versus having a little of your favorite ice cream as a reward for making a difficult call to a relative or going to that appointment you've been putting off.<p>Scrum has been so co-opted by management that it tries to disallow any sort of self-soothing on a project. I am forever having to misrepresent the importance of work that I 'needed' to do that perhaps not everyone else sees the wisdom of. Either hiding it entirely or overselling it. Because if I have to deal with the consequences (including dealing with other people who are affected) of this goddamned piece of code any longer I'm going to quit, and what will happen to your precious schedules then?<p>"Refactoring" 1st Ed is, through this lens, formalized self-care represented as philosophy instead of psychology. For many of us it feels good (or at least, not doing it feels <i>awful</i>) but we can't say that, so we make it about ethics.<p>There was a videotaped interview with Joel Spolsky a ways back, and I couldn't tell you a thing about what he was being interviewed about except for his answer to the warmup question, which was delivered half jokingly, about how over time his job has changed to psychotherapist, and that his bookshelf has slowly converted to a few technical books and a lot of psychology books. Of course we cannot be serious about such things, so he had to joke about it.
I like viewing groups as emotional systems, probably more than is helpful in a work environment, but I think some of this could be worth mentioning.<p>> Therapy (with a body focus) ... IFS (I tend to recommend against traditional talk therapy, I find it a poor way to deal with ourselves)<p>Though in the end they probably won't be helpful for anything more than soft skills, since it's work.<p>On the subject of family therapy things in general, the broad concepts taught in them are so good, some of them can come up in groups and basic interaction.<p>- Triangulation: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangulation_(psychology)#Family" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangulation_(psychology)#Fam...</a><p>- The 8 concepts here: <a href="https://thebowencenter.org/theory/eight-concepts/" rel="nofollow">https://thebowencenter.org/theory/eight-concepts/</a> (triangles are the first one)<p>Good ones: Murray Bowen, Salvador Minuchin, Virginia Satir<p>Videos: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLQOWoom2d0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLQOWoom2d0</a> (Bowen), <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJEewdFPB7M" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJEewdFPB7M</a> (Minuchin), <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql3mPOcX7kY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql3mPOcX7kY</a> (Satir)<p>Good book: <i>Interpersonal Process in Therapy: An Integrative Model</i><p>As I say this though, Family therapy is intense stuff that I don't think would make sense out of nowhere. Unless they were open minded and willing to put the legwork in. I've been exposed to it many times over years and didn't really connect with it.<p>Ever been through family / life / circumstances where you were dependent on a selfish jerk who viewed others as <i>their own</i> pin cushion, with no interest in cooperation? Come out of those a couple of times, then look these concepts/books up. You'll get where they're coming from!
This strikes me as the wrong framing. It's more about managing your expectations and maintaining a clear-eyed view of the way forward. Life rarely goes as planned. Three rules of thumb I try to remember in a crisis or setback are Gerald Weinberg's set of Rhonda's Revelations:<p>What looks like a crisis is the end of an illusion.<p>When change is inevitable, we struggle most to keep what we value most.<p>When you create an illusion to prevent or soften change, the change becomes more likely--and harder to take.
I hear you. I also think framing emotions through an analogy of finance send you down the wrong path.<p>It requires a great deal of emotional energy to do things that are uncomfortable. And stretching yourself beyond your comfort zone as first time founder compounds the experience. But emotional “debt” cannot be paid back in the same way technical or monetary debt can be. Those are tools. Pushing yourself too hard can destroy you and your capacity to achieve your goals.<p>Treat your feelings more like gas in a gas tank with no gas station for 100s of miles. You can drive as fast or inefficiently as you’d like; just remember you’re walking the rest of the way.
It was too painful. Spent 6 years or so. I;ve given up. Honestly corporate salaries will earn you 3-4 million by the time you are 37 or so. Why bother with rinky dink startups anyways?
As someone who works for a startup, I long for the day every jackass and their donkey who sold a company to a tech conglomerate will not rule the minds of other startup founders. Sadly it's more likely that I will witness the heat death of the universe.
I wonder what the stress would be like if you were running a bootstrapped, profitable business instead of betting everything on one big break, as in VC backed companies. I follow IndieHackers (<a href="https://indiehackers.com" rel="nofollow">https://indiehackers.com</a>) and people seem to be pretty chill on there, just treating it as more like a small business making 5 figures a month instead of trying to build unicorns.