#startupstress* Comes From Taking Responsibility For Uncertainty
By: Katarina Skoberne
Tags: Resilience, Entrepreneurship, Startups

Entrepreneurs are not average people. If they were, they’d be the majority, and the majority of people do not start businesses, even in developing countries where running your own business is a necessity rather than a choice, and the ratios of entrepreneurship are highest. (The country with the highest ratio of entrepreneurs is Uganda, at 28% of the population.)

Where entrepreneurship is more of a choice, it has in recent years also become more fashionable. In some European countries, entrepreneurs are the rockstars of the 2010s — everybody wants to be one. But even if more accepted, proper entrepreneurs are no more average than before.

In his book “A First Rate Madness”, Dr. Nassir Ghaemi correlates traits derived from overcoming depression and bipolar disorder to the capacity to lead in extreme circumstances. Leaders such as Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King all battled depression and all had abilities that suited them to extreme leadership more than to the status quo. Ghaemi lists these as creativity, empathy, resilience and realism.

Working in and leading a start-up can seem like a war, and it is at the least a hard fight, particularly in disruptive start-ups, where you are not only fighting for funding while you battle to alter consumer behavior, you are also being faced with a powerful establishment aggressively pushing the waves of change back over your head. Creativity, empathy, resilience and realism: all sorely needed, resilience in particular. There is some dissent as to what constitutes resilience. Martin Seligman, the ‘father of positive psychology’ hinges resilience on optimism; Diane Coutu, who has collated learnings that included Victor Frankl’s writing about Holocaust survival and seeking meaning as one of the key components for resilience, finds that realists are the ones who survive extreme circumstances best and longest. Accounts of resilience as well as my personal experience in losing all things material and my business lead me to believe that this duality is at the crux of resilience — an awareness of the potentially negative reality, and an ability to work towards a positive outcome at the same time. A realistic optimism. An awareness of transience. Perspective. That kind of resilient thinking can be practiced, as a discipline, much like the like the tool du jour, mindfulness, enabling us to better face the everyday ups and downs of start-up life.

Start up founders are not average. A personality built for extremes — and often of extremes — is required. “It’s about degrees,” says John D. Gartner, a psychologist and author of “The Hypomanic Edge” in the New York Times. “If you’re manic, you think you’re Jesus. If you’re hypomanic, you think you are God’s gift to technology investing.” Extreme drive, extreme determination, courage, passion, intuition. And, as with all traits, these can work both ways. What drives you and makes you a good and sometimes successful entrepreneur can also be your downfall — be it stubborn determination, or a reliance on intuition, or courage bordering on recklessness. The ego that drives you up can also drive you down. Sometimes it’s worth sticking to your guns, sometimes it’s necessary to pivot. Sometimes your gut is right, sometimes data should be driving your decisions. The kerfuffle is knowing when and which and it is for the founder to own these decisions. This is the very essence of #startupstress. Taking responsibility for uncertainty.

In work with entrepreneurs there is no template, and like much of psychological support, it relies on injecting the missing ingredient. Sometimes we need to counter a lack of confidence, for others the missing ingredient can be the humility to counter an arrogance that does not equal confidence.

There are however commonalities as well, and advice can be summed up in three points, each pertaining to two sides of one trait:

Use your ego positively:

to boost your confidence,

to believe you can achieve when the odds are against you,

to pick yourself up, every hour, every day, again and again;

and kick the downside of your ego out:

put your business first — you’re not out to prove a point, you’re out to run a profitable company,

a good idea doesn’t have to come from you — pivot if you need to,

it’s ok to be wrong, and you can survive failure — it’s only money and pride.

2. Balance your intuition and your data, your heart and your brain.

Your intuition is what will drive you to create and innovate and it can also deceive you into misinterpreting market needs and gaps;

Your intuition is what will help you hire the right people — the ones that will realize your vision — and it can also lead you to hire the wrong people: don’t mistake confidence and enthusiasm for competence.

3. Make your drive, persistence, passion work for you and not against you:

You’ll need to work more than you ever thought was possible, and you’ll need to learn to take breaks against all your instincts;

You will need to know when to keep going even if all is stacked against you, and you will need to know when it’s over and act against every grain of your being, with dignity;

You will need to give your all, and you won’t be able to expect the same of anyone else.

We’ve all gone through the same wringer. Sleepless nights: tick. Seeking reliable team members on limited funds: tick. Not making payroll: tick. Last minute deal delays: tick. Being the last go-to for morale, and drawing it from the last bedraggled cell when you didn’t know there was any left: tick. Making gut decisions and begging the gut to be right: tick.

The start-up experience is quite uniform and we each deal with it drawing on our particular strengths, whether that’s seeking victory over others, or over ourselves. It’s balancing our drivers right that’s the hard part, the success maker or breaker. And that comes down to the founder and how she is able to manage uncertainty.

I’ve been in mentoring start-up founders from my twenties onwards, but it wasn’t until my third venture failed (after two successful previous lives), that I was able to put my experience into context and add more value than the usual compulsively positive cheerleading we were able to offer each other as start-up founders under chronic stress. I’ve worked with dozens of start-up founders and a few recurring themes come up.

A. Attachment to the vision

Many successful start-ups feature products that are far off their original plan — those are the ones whose founders were able to suppress their belief in their original vision when proven wrong, and pivot. The tipping point for pivoting isn’t always easy to determine, as history also teaches us that some start-ups succeeded because they persisted long enough — but if we are at least able to consider another point of view, it becomes easier to gauge the right answer.

B. Cut-off

The same is true for knowing when the fat lady has sung — especially in the face of Thomas Edison’s quote: “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up”. It’s useful to ask yourself how much you can take — psychologically and financially. (And to always know that at least psychologically you can take a little more than you think.)

C. Resilience

Survival isn’t about how long it takes you to break, it’s about how much you can come back from, and how frequently. For most entrepreneurs that means bouncing back from stress and rejection on a daily basis. Sometimes it’s better to break a little, more frequently, than break a lot much later.

Resilience and recovery can also be practiced and prepared for. If you are accustomed to seeing both sides of the coin, the positive and negative, while charging forth as the warrior every entrepreneur is, you won’t be afraid of the negative. You’ve already seen it.

D. Uncertainty and fear

Uncertainty breeds fear and very often, especially in young entrepreneurs, that fear is dealt with by ignoring it and pretending to be fearless. There is no such thing — or it’s called insanity, which is also one way of being an entrepreneur, though quite risky. The more courageous way is to acknowledge the fear, do your best to harness it positively in the greater scheme of things, and not let it get to you in the small things. Fear is the world’s greatest motivator, might as well make it work for you.

E. Mental toughness and mental illness

Mental toughness is not a vaccine against mental illness. I’ve seen some of the mentally toughest people suffer from depression — in fact some are that tough also because they’ve fought a mental illness in the course of their lives. Every businessperson who has spoken out about depression talks of developing a positive routine for themselves, one that can include talk therapy, medication, exercise, a loving environment, and positive challenges. What companies can do is create awareness, empathy and understanding, including highlighting the positive traits a mental illness can foster — and they are particularly applicable to start-ups.

F. Support network

Only people who’ve been through what you are going through will be able to understand. Fact.

G. Kindness

You’re an entrepreneur. That doesn’t make you Steve Jobs. And even he didn’t need to behave the way he did to do be the genius that he was. It just happened that the two coincided.

*The hashtag #startupstress was coined by Cindy Gallop, founder of MakeLoveNotPorn, a force of nature global exec of whom no one would have ever surmised she even knew what the word meant. “You think nobody else has been through this? Everybody’s been through this.”