Virtual Infection that hits Entrepreneurs
By: Strongly Fragile
Tags: Startup Life, Founders, Entrepreneur, Startup, Entrepreneurship

“Virtual Infection”: A jeopardous rust that is eating away the true entrepreneurial spirit!

Entrepreneurs,a weird combination of talent, perseverance, dedication, excessive self belief, a unicorn dream and loads of grit. Being an entrepreneur, these folks are putting their best face out there every day, wearing different hats for different roles that they need to play in their startup journeys.

When one works in a day job setup ,they usually have one boss that they report to .However as a founder, they have multiple bosses-their investor, customer, collaborator,employee,ecosystem facilitator and partner; everyone turns out to be their boss at some point or the other.

It is the “fullest” full time job where one needs more than 24 hours a day sometimes to fulfill their duties and responsibilities. It can sometimes get too lonely as well and just as the highs that it gives ,it can be equally tasking.But entrepreneurs take the path not taken and fight against all odds .It’s not an easy job but they still chose to do it to follow their passion and to live their dreams, that’s what most of the entrepreneurs claim too.

If it were a true dream and passion ,then why even after putting their heart, mind, soul, sweat and time into their work, most of the young entrepreneurs feel a lack of contentment? Why do they feel themselves drowning into the depth of sadness? There is a well documented study that also shows that they are at risk of getting depression, bipolar disorder or other mental illnesses.

From our own experience, this sadness or depression is not absolute. One factor among various others is that they have made their happiness reliant on other folks and their judgement. Most of the time, they link their measure of success to the number of likes, re-tweets,re-posts,appreciations and shares on social media. Every other entrepreneur seems to be having a ‘high-life’ on social media, being present at fancy events and conferences, getting “some awards” (no one checks the credibility of those events and awards). Most of the young entrepreneur’s experience “FOMO” in case they are not part of this virtual success posts or retweets. It has become a metric that they have started waking up to rather than the dreams that kept them awake to kickoff of this journey.

“Virtual Success”: Is it a true success metric ?Is it even worthy enough to pacify an entrepreneur of his glorious vision and settle for?

It looks like everyone is successful in the virtual world while the ground reality is harshly different. Many times this pressure to be a virtual success leads to a deviation from the true success.

Eventually, they start living in this delusional world of virtual success.While they are far away from reaching their true milestones (the vision with which they had started up), they make this virtual success the way to convince themselves they are doing fine(in a pseudo sense). It may seem insignificant in the beginning, but it piles up over time. In the long term, it can cause irreparable damage which may be severe depression when reality takes a hit, not able to convert their idea to business, losing their team and passion etc. The consequences can hit back very strongly!

They start becoming victims of their own propaganda which they created on social media platforms.

We are writing this for two purposes:

One, so that our fellow entrepreneurs who struggle with this pressure can introspect;

and

Two, so that the upcoming and budding entrepreneurs don’t get dragged into this blind race of social media success. It is just pointless and not worthy of one’s precious time to have this noise of virtual success messing with their heads. They need to focus on the concrete things,build a strong foundation through rigorous processes and stick to their true success metrics with determination.

If a tree does not have strong roots, any wind would easily uproot it!