Conquering Builder Anxiety
Building something new is a string of consecutive sprints. This is painful.
If you've founded a startup or a small business, like tens of millions of Americans, you've felt anxiety at some point on your journey. Probably panic too.
You're not anxious about one specific thing, as you'd rationally think you might be. You have delocalized anxiety. Perhaps you feel nausea, or crawling out of your own skin, or you're surrounded by cacophony. So common are the symptoms, that on HBO's Silicon Valley—part parody, part documentary about building a startup—the founder of the fictional startup vomits in front of the whole company right before a presentation.
But he's not crazy. And neither is anyone who has felt this way. Building something new is an epic, body-and-mind consuming challenge that pushes you. Like many things that drive growth, this is painful.
This is the first in a series of posts on what I've learned about training the mind, over a decade of building a startup.
Running hard, all the time
Building a new business is a collection of back to back sprints.
At a startup, something goes wrong every week. You maintain extreme optimism to push forward. Part of a company's success is in its ability to harness paranoia and anxiety to anticipate and avoid all of the things lurking around the corner that could go wrong. Optimism and paranoia are rewarded with euphoria when things go right and punished with bouts of panic when things go sideways or worse.
Building something is similar to running hard. Sprint a mile as hard as you can and you'll feel terrible at the end. Now try a few of those sprints in a row. Building a company is a long collection of back to back one-mile sprints.
Building something from scratch forces your brain to run as hard as possible for a long time. Anxiety is like lactic acid buildup in the brain. Just like your muscles get sore, your mind does too. This is not to minimize anxiety of the builder, but to call it what it is: pain from extreme mental exertion.
To build something great, exertion is required. The question I've long asked myself: must this exertion be accompanied by panic? Fortunately, the answer is no.
A solution
As long as you have the drive to build, you never defeat anxiety. But you can mitigate it to near zero.
It took me many years of building a company to discover two things most effective at minimizing builder's anxiety:
