“Ativan for Non-Technical Founders”

Liz Funk
Liz Funk
Jul 23, 2017 · 3 min read

In the future, many more people will be launching their own technology companies. The beauty of our time is that there are many products and platforms that bridge the divide between people who want to execute on a solution that involves technology and actually having technical skills.

Shout out to Squarespace, specifically.

That said, I find working to set up an online shop in Squarespace so confusing and frustrating that I have to mentally counteract my body’s urge to go into fight-or-flight mode. I feel hyper and my hands are tingling; the tingling hands is the unique way I experience anxiety.

But there’s no large, fanged animal to fight and nothing to flee from. In fact, Squarespace is just a visually beautiful design platform that I’m learning how to use.

I’m taking deep breaths and recalling my favorite teachers.

In her book, the Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin described the very early days of establishing her Happiness Project platform, specifically setting up her first Typepad site. A lawyer by training, she found the technology foreign and confusing. So, she learned how to harness her frustration. She wrote:

As I struggled to master these tasks, I felt rushed and anxious when I couldn’t figure something out right away, until I hit upon a way to help myself slow down: I “put myself in jail.” “I’m in jail,” I’d tell myself. “I’m locked up with nowhere to go and nothing to do except the task in front of me. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, I have all the time I want.” Of course, this wasn’t true, but telling myself that I had all the time I needed helped me to focus.

I adore Gretchen Rubin and her body of work. So, I’m borrowing a page from her — kind of literally — here.

Similarly, last summer I had the opportunity to interview Cal Newport, the prolific author and Georgetown University professor who has written extensively about productivity and achieving excellence at work and school (his book Deep Work is one of my favorites). He told me a story about when he started his graduate degree in computer science at MIT. During his first semester, he decided to change his concentration to a computer science topic that interested him, that he hadn’t studied as an undergraduate. He worried that he was poised to fall behind his classmates and that he faced an intimidating tower of topics to learn. So, he shifted his mindset and changed up his self-talk. He told me that he would say to himself,

“This is challenging, but I enjoy learning new things.”

Simple, but so profound! I’m trying to adopt this myself: yes, I find the technical aspects of building my business very uncomfortable. I’m much less frightened by activities like attending networking events alone and introducing myself to new people, or literally spending the last of my savings on LLC filing fees. These honestly don’t bother me. Changing the entire look of my web-site with one wrong keystroke bothers me.

So I sit up nice and tall in my chair. I let my shoulders fall (they tend to climb up towards my ears when I’m tense). I take a deep breath and say to myself: “This is really confusing, but I enjoy learning new things.”

In fact, when I calm down enough, I like visualizing myself a year from now, looking back on me today, and recalling how I struggled at first to learn the technical tasks that I have learned to do with ease.

In the meantime, I’m going to keep breathing, and wait for one of the sprawling pharmaceutical companies of southern New Jersey to release the pill of my dreams, “Ativan for Non-Technical Founders.”

Serial entrepreneur | Business development + PR consultant for growing companies.

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