Happiness and Entrepreneurship
Success Without Suffering
Start-up culture often celebrates suffering as the path to success. I believe this is a myth that actually drives more entrepreneurs to failure than success. Happiness is the ultimate fuel to help an entrepreneur through the tough times that inevitably arise while building a business, whereas prolonged suffering leads to burn out and diminished resiliency.
Why is start-up culture into celebrating suffering? I believe most entrepreneurs are achievers who measure themselves based on external success and a sense of overcoming struggle by pushing through obstacles. This is a wonderful thing that can produce amazing results, but the question is whether it’s sustainable or optimal? Imagine if instead of fighting your way to success, you could ride the wave and enjoy dancing through life and building your company. Wouldn’t that be a more likely way to repeatedly achieve what you seek and wouldn’t it be preferable to enjoy the journey, not just the destination?
I also think investors reinforce this myth and create a sense of pressure for entrepreneurs to not have a balanced happy life beyond just their company. While this can work, I think it is a mistake as investors will not end up maximizing long term value of a start-up with this mindset. This is why we focus so heavily with founders to ensure they are enjoying the extraordinary process of building and scaling a company.
It’s also important to consider as an entrepreneur and investor what drives you to start a company in the first place — often a desire to contribute to the world. Entrepreneurs tend to focus on the big impact it’s possible to have across a large number of people with their product or service, but that contribution starts with your team and the inspiration you provide.
If you build a culture that is based on suffering through challenges, you instigate suffering in your immediate community and that has ripple effects to each member of your team and their families and friends. If you build a culture based on joy and celebration, you spread that to everyone in your life — and that is the greatest impact you can possibly have on this world. Happy people don’t hurt others. Happy people create and contribute to everyone around them, simply by their inspiration of happiness and these seemingly small acts become amplified to create large scale global impacts.
Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in seed-stage companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation and agriculture.
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