The Lowest point of the sine curve
The whole entrepreneurial experience is like a sine curve — nothing that hasn’t been said before.
Over the last few months, I’ve been through a few such cycles. I’m beginning to make peace with the knowledge that the curve is going to remain, and also that the magnitude is only going to increase to shocking levels in the future. There are days which are crests. You wake up feeling great and you are extremely productive, good things happen. But this post isn’t about those days: It’s about the troughs— the days where you wake up feeling like shit!
Troughs: You realise you may fail, and think of 99 innovative ways in which you can mess up. One bad decision, and there may not be a recovery. These days are important to talk about because you need to quickly find a solution to deal with them (I have not found mine yet, of course).
For those of you who have not experienced “these troughs”, here is an attempt to paint you a picture: “You are tossing around in bed, with a burning sensation in your stomach. You look at the clock and realise it’s 3:45am. You shut your eyes, and hear sounds, questions you are asking yourself. What if the market doesn’t accept the product?What if you don’t end up motivating your team to work? What if competition kills you even before you take a few initial steps?….What were you thinking when you decided to do this? A few other essential questions along the same lines that begin to aggravate the burning sensation…. by the time you force yourself to stop, you realise it’s 5am. You can’t seem to sleep so you attempt to do productive work,or do whatever it takes to keep yourself occupied.
At 7am, you receive a notification about something going off schedule with work. It’s pushed launch date by two weeks! You know you can’t afford to push things, not even by a day at this stage — your mind quickly goes back to all the questions you asked yourself a few hours ago.It’s 8:30am, and your brains feel like swollen soggy marshmallows, you’ve bitten the bullet and decided to invest in a few extra man hours to bring the whole schedule back on track — it was the most practical way to course correct. Atleast, that’s what you say to comfort yourself.
Just when you’ve finished dealing with that situation, you receive a message from your partner that the inventory purchased, that precious first order — yeah, the order was cancelled, for no apparent reason. You hear the frustration in your partner’s voice.You hear the disappointment, so you’ve got to try staying positive. You tell her it’s ok, and it’s just the first few glitches — it was all going to be ok. We just have to repeat “the process” all over again.
It’s 10:45 am and you have to rush to school, because you do have 45 more days of business school to earn yourself the MBA degree, that degree that everyone in the startup world is going to frown upon.
Fast-forward to the cafeteria at noon, where you are having lunch with your fellow colleagues. The atmosphere is terribly tensed, it is recruitment season after all. You have one of the brightest boys from class sitting next to you— mid way through lunch he receives a message from one of the top recruiters in Europe, and he practically reads out how fantastic his offer is. Of course, you are happy for him, but fear takes over. Sitting there, in the middle of the cafeteria, nothing expect intense fear in your stomach - it hits you that the beautiful satisfaction of having a salary credited to your account, is not going to happen for a long time! You are going to retain that poor student lifestyle, while everyone else you know if planning their fancy holidays with their joining bonuses :/ ”
The day only gets worse, but you get the gist of what I’m attempting to explain here. There is no way out, you have got to suck it up, tell yourself that it’s going to get better.Have yourself a few glasses of delicious “cheap” wine — a luxury you have only for a few more days before you head back home — to the cut-throat motherland.
That evening on the metro ride back home, my roommate said to me: “Rather than trying to preserve our body to last forever, we should aim at getting as many bruises from our experiences that the body can’t take anymore and gives up — that would be the sanctity in death” :)
