How to build a successful startup while not giving up on spirituality?
There’s a lot of ways to tell a story you still don’t know its end…
This article will not answer the question in its title, but it will be first step in a self-revealing answer which is the journey me and my partner are embarking on.
This question is not the one I started off with when I decided to build our startup. The question I had back then could be easily compared to the entrepreneurial itch that many successful entrepreneurs are talking about when asked why they did what they did. The question was ‘How to build a startup’.
That initial question was infused with a lot of inspiration and curiosity, which in turn generated enthusiasm to learn everything I can about it. The desire behind that question was clear — “I want to create”.
For me that that point, creation was the end goal. And when creation, which is the process of creating, is your end goal the path is fun and enjoyable as the goal is achieved with every step you take. Every step you take in the process of creation is creation itself.
However, a few months into this journey, my question, and therefore my goal suddenly changed. It’s only in hindsight that I know it has changed. It took me about a month to notice it.
I think it was after our first pitch ever. We got to the last step in the application process of one of the best startup accelerators programs in Israel in which we were asked hard questions about our business that we had trouble answering. Up until that point all questions were a source of inspiration, a way to learn how to do what we want to do better, but at the point where for the first time we had to be graded and valued things changed.
For the first time, the questions started to really bother me. Or to phrase it more accurately, it was the fact that I had no answers to these questions that bothered me.
Let’s take a break in the storyline for a second to go back to what the title of the article is really about.
The sentence above, which stands different from the rest with italic font, is what I find lacking in most startup stories I read so far. It discusses just the shallow, overly simplistic, not entirely honest, realm of experience.
The fact it I wasn’t bothered because I didn’t have answers to these questions. I felt bothered because the experience shook me emotionally and triggered emotions of guilt and shame. This is a more accurate description of the experience which can point one to the more important issue to attend to.
Most startup stories would go on from that sentence mentioned above to discuss the actual questions and how to reach an answer to these questions. However, one could claim that a bothered and guilt-full entrepreneur is one that has significantly less capacity and capability to attend to this technical problem.
It is scientifically proven that stress, which guilt and many other un-handled emotions are the source of, causes the brain to function deficiently and logic to be impaired.
Back to our storyline.
After the experience with the accelerator, my question and end goal suddenly changed. It was no longer about creation and learning to build. It was all about succeeding, and getting recognition for this success. This is where I stopped having fun.
I need another break here…
Any one who started walking in the path of spirituality, or for that matter even adulthood, knows that doing things just for the recognition and affection of others is a dead-end road which will lead you nowhere but a path of self-detachment and despair. There are things you just can’t rely on the outside world to give you since their true source it within. It’s a topic for another article though.
As for success, which was acclaimed as my new goal, it’s a relative term. Success is only what one makes of it. There are people for whom having the courage to quit your job and go build something is a success, for others it’s only if they managed to build a big company, and they say that for investors it’s only when you were able to sell or IPO your company:). For many though, getting up from bed in the morning is a huge success.
When contemplating long and deep enough on the concept of success, and any other relative concept for that matter, it becomes obvious that one shouldn’t be bothered with achieving or becoming that relative term, because the mind will just set the bar higher. The desire of becoming or achieving something which is subjective and relies on perception is unstable and will most likely won’t result with a sustainable nice-inner-feeling that we all want to constantly have. More about that is another article I guess.
Back to the story line…
So the last few weeks were not fun. I was deeply affected by every feedback we got and I felt like I wasn’t good enough for the task. I started thinking about possible pivots to our startup even before we really gave it a chance. Even before it made sense.
I could see it started to disturb my partner but I’m lucky enough to have a partner that is able to balance me and put my feet back on the ground as much as I am able to do the same for him.
He rightfully pointed out that I’m taking into consideration and giving too much value to other people’s opinions instead of trusting my own and he rather go after my ‘wrong’ guts rather than the single experience of other people.
That got me thinking about the opinions I started to adopt and treat them as my own. I listened to many people, each of them with their own story, and each of them has their own reasoning to why they failed or succeeded. Many of them are just repeating the reasoning of others before them. Thing is, reasoning is not truth. It is always an estimation based on perception and thus subjective and doesn’t fit all. I totally forgot that.
Obviously all the people I talked to meant well, and all of them tried their best to help. But my mind at that time was addicted to worrying, as minds tend to be sometimes, so every helpful tip or story immediately generated more worries and reasons to fear.
I can’t put my finger on what was it that shifted my point of view, I guess it’s just experience with the tendencies of mind, though it could be many others reasons as well, but the same way I lost myself into worries and thoughts I suddenly became aware of being lost and was able to start questioning the reaction to the situation.
I started to notice the joy of creation was no longer there since creation is no longer what I focused on. I started to refocus on what I already undoubtedly know matters the most, which is love and compassion. I began to see the stormy ocean instead of drowning in it, and forgiveness started to emerge.
I realized the only path I can take is my own, and this path might be different than what other entrepreneurs did before me, but that’s the only path possible.
Spirituality has been a huge part of my life in past decade (note that spirituality is different than religion, and I might write about that in the future) and going through this journey without holding on to it is experientially not an option.
Everywhere people talk about the difficulty of building a startup, and the sacrifices an entrepreneur must make in order to give birth to their creation, and no one talks about how to deal with those difficulties in a way that is deeply helpful. How can one stop experience events as difficult, but always experience them as surprising, enriching, and even amusing?
Technical solutions or bright ideas are inspirational yes, but they usually fit just this certain situation and are hard to copy. Spirituality however is much more helpful because it’s about the realm beyond mind and logic, which is shared by all no matter the situation. Everyone can understand what worrying is, while it’s harder to understand what to do when you’re a SaaS startup that is looking for its target market. Even when I solve this last one, it will probably have little value to your startup, even if it’s a SaaS.
The only one I know who slightly jointly discusses startups and spirituality is Michael A. Singer, the previous CEO of WebMD, who wrote an amazing book called ‘The surrender experiment’. I highly recommend it.
I started this journey with the question ‘how to build a startup?’. Now, my question and what I’m set to learn is more accurate. I want to learn how to build a successful startup while not giving up on spirituality? Or better yet, how to build a successful company which love, compassion and honesty are its core values?
I’ll be sharing this journey here.
Note to self on future articles:
* What is our current problem in our startup
* What is spirituality
* Success and other subjective and vague terms
* Why do you do what you do
* More on the experience in the last month
* Honesty and the startups industry