Tip #8: Prepare for the Emotional Roller Coaster
If there was one thing I wish I had been better prepared for before quitting my regular job, that would be the roller coaster of emotions that you go through as an entrepreneur.
Before you jump in, do yourself a favor and consider how you’ll deal with big things that go wrong.
So, before you jump in, do yourself a favor and consider how you’ll deal with big things that go wrong. In a startup, anything that can go wrong probably will at some point. How you react to what will seem at the time like the end of the world may become the deciding factor between making it big and flaming out.
What causes the emotional roller coaster? Some causes are things that you already experience today, only they’re amplified 1000%. Things like self-doubt, ego, social anxiety and all your hopes and dreams will cause you to feel like a heroin junkie. One day you’ll think you’re about to solve world hunger, and the next day you’ll wish you were never born.
Other causes of your new found manic-depression will be things that maybe you’ve never experienced before, like running out of money, or having to lay people off, or having complete strangers publicly verbally destroy you or your company. These things all can and do happen in the course of entrepreneurship. To reach great heights, you’ll have to take risks and you’ll probably attract some people who decide to hate you for reasons not even related to you.
Many of these things will be unavoidable because you can’t control everything. However, some pre-planning and awareness can go a long way towards helping you cope better. Try to imagine how you would feel when confronted with any of the scenarios I mentioned. Do they scare you? Your best chance of survival is to grow some thicker skin. If you don’t, the emotions can cause you to make ridiculously bad decisions or even put you in the doctor’s office from stress.
Here are a few things I’ve learned about how to stay off the roller coaster:
Be prepared for failure. Failure is the most valuable thing an entrepreneur can experience. It’s a good thing in many ways. Just because something you attempted fails doesn’t make you personally a failure. Learn to compartmentalize different projects and let them fail individually without causing you to call into question everything you stand for and have worked to become. There is something to be said for failing fast so that you can learn about what worked and move quickly to your next project.
Don’t seek perfection. Perfection is cancer for a new business. Your goal should be to do only what is necessary to make 80% of your customers happy. Use the Pareto principle (the 80/20 rule) ruthlessly. Fix time and budget and let scope flex. Seeking perfection will only cause you to miss opportunities and ultimately fail.
Take a longer-term perspective. In a startup, everything will seem to be urgent, and you’ll have a keen sense of how valuable every day is. Because of this focus on the short-term, you may be tempted to measure your success on a daily basis. Don’t give in to that temptation. Whatever it is you’re measuring could fluctuate enormously from day-to-day and that fluctuation will also cause you to feel high and low along with it. Take a longer-term perspective and remove the fluctuations from your measurement. If you’re building a website, it’s probably best to measure statistics (pageviews, subscribers, etc.) on a weekly or monthly basis.
First and foremost, a start-up puts you on an emotional rollercoaster unlike anything you have ever experienced. You flip rapidly from day-to-day – one where you are euphorically convinced you are going to own the world, to a day in which doom seems only weeks away and you feel completely ruined, and back again. Over and over and over. And I’m talking about what happens to stable entrepreneurs. There is so much uncertainty and so much risk around practically everything you are doing. The level of stress that you’re under generally will magnify things incredible highs and unbelievable lows at whiplash speed and huge magnitude. Sound like fun?
Marc Andresson, Founder of Netscape and Ning
