Startup is not an excuse to run away from your passion

The wrong things I did to myself as a co-founder.

A few months back, I was thinking about our startup, lying on top of the terrace all alone, in the darkness, watching for the occasional meteores burn down from the sky during the Geminid Meteor Shower. I heard the pandemonium of the city all around me, with its usual hustle and bustle all coming to a halt past midnight. Just this evening, I had a heated debate with my co-founders regarding the marketing activities. We had recently secured seed funding and I needed a clear transparency on our strategies and operations; which at the moment, they didn’t have. After hours of heated debate, I had decided to free up my mind from the Agile lifestyle and take a break for a little while, even though I knew well that the kind of tired I am cannot be fixed by a break. It was during that break, months ago, that I realized that I was doing something really wrong running a company. The short break had lent me perspective.

Realization

Despite of the fact that I was tired as dead, both mentally and physically, I couldn’t take a proper break. Taking time off was difficult. My mind was not accustomed to that. I had battle trained myself to be constantly learning — up to a certain point that I had begun to take it that there was something colossally wrong when I had some time to spare. There were numerous Sunday afternoons I wish I had spent lazily lying in my bed, looking outside at the birds and the blue skies, listening to Snow Patrol. Evenings in which I had wanted to sip coffee and read Dan Brown, nights in which I had wanted to nostalgically recollect movies I saw as a child, like Bridge to Terabithia- and reflect on Leslie’s tragedy. But somewhere deep inside the recess of my mind, guilt would flow in, like a conditioned programmatic expression of my will; reminding me that I was doing something wrong.

If you are having a little bit of free time, you are doing it wrong. Someone would murmur from inside my head, like a siren’s song on a moonless night at a forbidden sea; and letting that someone take me over completely was the first mistake.

The one thing that goes to my mind now is, even though I know it is pointless — regret. Since that night on the Terrace, I have self corrected my path; and I am at peace, running my startup along a new found work-life balance. I am writing about it here so that others starting the journey can know and doesn’t have to go through whatever I went through. This is the letter I would have sent to a younger me if I had a time machine. Correct your mistakes before it is too late. If you read this; you can possible self correct your course from a mile away before ramming into that iceberg that will sink your ship.

Mistake #1: Building the company without building yourselves.

Entrepreneurship is an epic journey. It is sometimes sad, unsettling, and unpredictable; but it’s beautiful and rewarding. The very first advice you are going to hear is “It is going to be a full-time job with no weekends off”. While it is true from a few angles, it is completely wrong and misinterpreted from all other vantage points and realizing that too late can lead to numerous emotional turmoil’s that wreak havoc in your life. Like the one I experienced, lying in the terrace.

A start-up cannot consume your entire life. Period. You may need to spend days and nights inside your office and on the field for the first few months. Maybe for a year. But beyond that, if you are required to sacrifice the other critical factors of your life consistently, like family, friendship, health and entertainment; if the startup is still chewing into your entire life greedily forever; you need to take caution and oil your engines or else it will come to a humiliating, grinding halt soon.

You can be running an all-consuming startup without being all-consumed yourself. Ethically.

The problem first starts to show its symptoms when you are having a bad time. Like an accelerated burn down. Increased churn rate. A financial deficit. When you have your downs, one day or other, you will contemplate over all the things you have missed. That book you kept on postponing. The guitar that lies dusty in the corner. The short-film script that your friend kept on asking to collaborate a thousand times, but you didn’t. All those will come back to haunt you.

Take away the startup from you; you cease to become a somebody.

You are skilled, cunning and valuable. But your life will feel hollow.

I am saying this because startup is mainly not about how deep you fall or high you rise- but how strong you will get back up.

You need to get back up. For that, you need all the help you would need. But firstly, that help must come from within. You need to be confident, content and optimistic.

But how on earth can you be optimistic and content when you have nothing else in your life that gives you confidence or value? When you have been postponing and ignoring all your life’s calling? You feel depressed. You understand that if the company is ripped away from you, you cease to be a somebody. Not because you are not skillful and won’t get hired anywhere, but because you have postponed all your passions for a cause that is still not panning out no matter how hard you try.

The sunk cost of all the life you wasted pulls you down; burning away what was left in your confidence, self-respect and satisfaction.

You may think that you can always go back to the drawing board, do the Avada kedavra, invent a pivot and you all can ride away together into the sunset. But that’s not going to happen. Without confidence, you won’t be able to make that pivot. You will spend the night in a local bar which you can hardly afford, instead of meeting up with the team to discuss the pivot.

If you need to do that, you need to fill your soul with what it craves. When you fall down, you need to have the strength. Think of them as the tethers attached to your body if you were an astronaut. On a fine day, you won’t need it. But when something goes south, you will need it to stay attached to your life.

To hold onto and to come back to your former glory. If you need to do that, you need to be someone without the startup at the first place. It need not be business or money; but can be something as simple as your hobbies or passion. The one that fills your soul with bliss. Trust me. No matter how all-consuming you think your journey is, you will need those tethers.

Mistake #2 : Abandoned writing.

I used to write a lot when I was in college. As much as I loved programming, I loved writing. My college was located in a hill station and there were all the kinds of things a writer wished for — dark and deep woods, mist, mountains, streams and an unlimited supply of caffeine. I was working on my novel, which required serious research. Throughout my entire college life, I remember myself researching, writing and editing every day. I remember having good friends who would visit our house on weekends and we would cook food, climb up our tree-house and discuss the novel, sipping our espresso amidst the mist. After I graduated as a computer Science engineer, I was caught up in the current of things. I moved to the city; and ended up in a cubicle as a junior engineer with big aspirations. My office life began to sink its dirty teeth into my private life, and soon, a few months, some columns in an excel sheet and a few literary agents later, my book was lying there in the bottom bunk of my dusty bookshelf. The dream was dead. I used to come back home late nights having worked overtime, and I remember polishing it and sending it to literary agents whom I used to track and follow-up in an excel sheet. But, after a while, I remember being permanently exhausted from work and giving up on everything I believed in. But the experience was worthwhile and I learned a lot from my first job.

After years, I ventured with my friends to go on the Start-up Journey. Brimming with youthful confidence at that time, and powered by Adrenalin, I burned my entire days into the startup, ignoring, postponing and abandoning the calls of the inner me. The company became my passion and obsession — and it is a good thing — but the problem was that, it became my only passion. You need to understand- One day, the money will come, the stress will multiply and the feel-good common grounds will give way to disturbing dissents. Many things will work out and many simply won’t. And just like me, you will lie down on the terrace, away from all the humans and the things they have built; and you will contemplate and reflect on your life, looking skywards, mentally exhausted and think about what would have been — All those stories partially written and not published, all those drawings that you never finished, all those music that never left your guitar.

All the things that would have been. All the alternate realities that you narrowly avoided to be right here where you are now.

Instead of finding the balance, you lived a dangerous life by abandoning your souls craving. It now sinks in you as you feel hollow. You could have done so many things without compromising your goals. You made your own illusion that there was no time and you believed in it. All the things that you postponed now weigh down on you. You couldn’t have possibly pulled off writing an entire book; but you could have spent an hour a week writing it, write a page or two and keep it moving; or you could have blocked half an hour every week to learn and play guitar. Or travel. That would have made you feel good. You could have kept the ball rolling; but your didn’t. You created your own illusion of time and believed in it. In your reality, you have your own justifications; and your brain just plays along and adjusts to your story.

Just like Leonardo Di Caprio [ Spoiler Alert !] in Shutter Island believes that he is a US Marshal investigating a missing patient in a clandestine island mental institution, but it turns out that he really is the patient; pretending as the marshal because he couldn’t cope up with the reality in which he has killed his wife and three kids.

Brain is the most powerful super-computer in the world. It is powerful enough to change your perception of reality. So when you think there is no time for all these while running a startup, there really is. You are just not allowed to see it.

Around you, the city will come to a standstill as you have your epiphany.

Mistake # 3. Abandoned books.

I had trained my mind in such ways to be technologically competitive that when I used to think about buying books, it became a question of whether that book would help me with programming, marketing or technology or not.

Then I remember burning my logic gates to arrive at a conclusion whether to buy Cosmos by Carl Sagan or Hooked by Nir Eyal.

I remember that once upon a time, books were timeless emotions for me; but now, they were logical constraints that competed for my time. I accumulated technical knowledge. Into such depths of algorithms and codes I went that I was not the same person when I resurfaced. Expertise in multiple programming languages, architectures and technologies, my brain had become acclimated to the high frequency movements of the technological world. In every heartbeat, there are scientific and technological breakthroughs in the world and I was obliged to know it; or more than just obliged — addicted. If there was an fMRI machine lying around somewhere, I could show you the fireworks my neurons would put on during Dopamine releases whenever I acquired a piece of knowledge. I was obsessed and addicted to information. I designed my own filters, created my own newsletters and set up my own news feed of knowledge — to separate the signal from the noise in a world that was overloaded with information. ( I will write about it more in the coming days so that you can create a balanced life with your own knowledge management system.) And in that hell of a haystack, I could never find time for my beloved thrillers and classics. Into the haystack went my Murakami, my Dan Brown, Paulo Coelho and Khaled Hosseini- never to be found again. I was making hay while the sun shone, but I wasn’t managing the warehouse. There were no more feel good dramas. No more Cosmos or Brief history of time. I was damned and I didn’t know it.

Mistake #4 : Abandoning the little spoils.

The occasional long phone call with an old friend and getting out of town with cousins are some of the few things I avoided for a long time. Now I realize that when I look back, I see nothing but emptiness. All my little cousins have grown up and they are not who they were and they remember me as a ghost who was not there to spend time with them as they were growing up. I have missed so much life. Friends. Girlfriend. All those were supposed to me my little joys- a way to supercharge my life with little breaks. I can never rewind time to make it right. Until someone invents a working flux capacitor and manages to traverse an Einstein-Rosen bridge and come up in one piece at the other end.

Lessons:

Enough talking about all the depressing mistakes.

Every cloud has a silver lining.

I have now corrected all those and now I weigh each moment of my life with much more parameters. I realize my mistakes and now I have created a balanced path in my life that still works for my company best. When you go all in, the fact you must understand is that this becomes a relay. Not a race. There are people running for you in your team. If they don’t keep up the pace — If they become lazy when you work; If they keep on postponing when you confront- all your struggles are going to be in vein. I mean, you will personally acquire a huge knowledge base and skill set, but you will feel burned out. You will feel that a lot of life has passed- and one day, would wake up with a Rip Van Winkle-ish type of feeling and will start to regret things you can’t change. Instead of going all in, I could have reserved little ounces of life to myself. I have heard people talking about it all the time — in bars, in the commuter trains at 5.45 PMs, and in blogs. You won’t understand it until it becomes too late. Like Morpheus says in the Matrix “There is difference between knowing the path and walking the path”.

My silver lining.

Even if I made all those mistakes, I acquired specific sets of skill sets. And I mastered them like Neo worked the Matrix — by understanding the secret recipes and complex formulas. There are no growth hacks. There are no How I mastered productivity in one week. There are no cheat codes to life. No silver bullets. There are no magical apps that can miraculously bring productivity into your lives. Sorry to break it to you, but you have to do it for yourself. Apps can become a very feeble support ecosystem, but I can see that the world is taken over by people getting high on productivity, like it is a drug — often failing to understand that it is right in front of us every damn time — Your brain. The ultimate productivity app. If you master how to talk to your brain, you can get it do anything for you. Throughout my journey, I learned how to efficiently do it. It might take time and effort, but it will work. I will start writing about those in the next blogs.

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