on growing a business while not freaking out (much)

By alice | October 5, 2009

trailer for “Dirty Mind”, a Belgian film from Fantastic Fest about a brain-injured stunt man who becomes fearless and dangerous

From Working hard is overrated at Caternia.net (HT Chris Yeh’s twitter):

We agreed that a lot of what we then considered “working hard” was actually “freaking out”. Freaking out included panicking, working on things just to be working on something, not knowing what we were doing, fearing failure, worrying about things we needn’t have worried about, thinking about fund raising rather than product building, building too many features, getting distracted by competitors, being at the office since just being there seemed productive even if it wasn’t — and other time-consuming activities.

In other words: first-time entrepreneurs, you may be working too hard. Or rather, “working” too hard!

Of course, “busy work” isn’t exactly limited to entrepreneurs, but they do have a very special reputation for working themselves to near-death, maybe because successful entrepreneurism has a reputation for demanding insane amounts of effort and energy.

But entrepreneurism is doubtless more stressful than many other jobs, because of the risks and the passions involved, so perhaps entrepreneurs are more prone to excess freak-out busy work, as a way of dealing with that stress. Any time one is anxious about work, the temptation is to do something/anything vaguely related to the job, rather than taking time out to regroup, get the creativity batteries recharged, interact with the world/ other humans in ways that might enable you to work more efficiently when you do work. But stepping back to gain perspective is, I think, behind Caterina’s advice on what is better to do:

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on. Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be. Being able to read what people want. Putting yourself in the right place where information is flowing freely and interesting new juxtapositions can be seen. But you can save yourself a lot of time by working on the right thing. Working hard, even, if that’s what you like to do.

I think some of this insight comes with experience, so first-time entrepreneurs are going to find it most difficult to do. Fund-raising, building extra features and analysing the competition may all need doing, so knowing when you’ve gone a bit over the top is difficult. It’s about balance and emphasis. I tried to turn the list above into a series of simple exercises: it didn’t work. They were too deep. But perhaps just focussing on these more valuable priorities may put them all in a clearer light. Or maybe one could brainstorm them at a coffee meeting. Or even meditate upon them in the bath.

On freaking out itself, I find that, having done other significant (to me) things with my life (teaching, SAHM-ing, volunteering) before starting my business (which is about to get bigger in the next few months, G-d willing, so this subject is relevant to me), I am now somewhat of a first-timer, and somewhat of an old-timer. Many of the aspects of business that are new to me, really do feel absolutely terrifying. The terrifyingness itself, however, does not inspire me to start freaking out- I’ve done lots of things that freaked me out before, and learned that redirecting the energy into useless work doesn’t make me feel any better. I think this is a personality thing, some people are better off going for a run, some people prefer to live in the office, and some of us prefer to do what we can at work (not everything: just whatever seems reasonable) and then do something else completely different.

That’s my impression. Yours may vary.

So, I’m not running round in circles, but I am still feeling the fear, and it’s not a very nice or useful feeling. So I’ve also been working on becoming more emotionally resilient ie. better able to handle anxiety. My life has always been about jumping feet first into the next new big (for me) thing, then madly figuring out how to survive and prosper afterwards. Once you accept that this is how you like to do things, and probably always will be, excess or disruptive fear starts to look like a pain in the a***, to say the least. Life is not going to get any less scary, so you just have to handle the scary better. And maybe that’s true for everyone. Also, acknowledging and tackling anxiety it could help people who are focussing on the wrong work, so they get more efficient at the right stuff.

I can’t help thinking that could result in a pretty huge culture shift, even today. We’re not as “macho” as we were, but there’s still a lot of it about, right?

1 Comment »

One Response to “on growing a business while not freaking out (much)”

Shefaly Says:
October 6th, 2009 at 2:49 am

All that and finding 1 or 2 people who understand you and your mission, and can be relied upon for advice or bouncing ideas with, knowing that they will not overly emotional even though they have your welfare at heart.