Dear Law of Negative Returns,

…thou art a heartless wench 🖕

Photo by Gabriel Matula on Unsplash

I admit it.

I am not perfect. But really, who is?

2017 was the worst year of my life…so far!

Things do get worse

Not only was I a full-time CS student, I was also the founder of a struggling startup(more on that in another story), and I didn’t realize I had depression.

I had started a business because I was bored, sick, and tired of the mundane existence of being a full-time student.

My daily routine typically involved:

Wake-up -> School -> Learn -> Back Home ->Tv/Read ->Sleep -> Repeat

My weekends were also not spared since I had mountains of assignments to work on.

And I had to go through this, all day, every day. With the hope that I would graduate with first-class honours, get a good well-paying job, and ‘start living life’.

Somewhere along the way, I just said fuck it!

I was tired of living a passive life, of waiting till I finished my education in order to explore my interests and discover what I ‘really’ wanted to do. So I decided to grab life by the horns by starting a business (one that I was deeply passionate about).

And as the old adage goes: shit just went sideways…in the most colossal way possible.

Don’t get me wrong.

I have no regrets about founding my startup. It was a wonderful learning experience and the fact that I was able to create something from a raw idea, well, … that was freaking awesome!!!

Let’s just say, in my experience, balancing startup life with full-time studies was a really bad idea. Chengeer Lee actually sums it up so much better in his blog post: What I learned from my failed startup (scroll to mistake 8…actually, read it all).

Your energy is not infinite and there are only 24 hours in a day for everyone. Something will suffer… What can be worse than a full-time job? Graduate studies… When you are an M.S. or a Ph.D. student you have no life. When you are trying to integrate a startup on top of your studies it becomes a living hell.

This is a piece of advice to all students out there thinking about a startup and planning to drop out: Don’t. Finish your school first. I mean it…

Get the degree. Get one thing done. Regardless of what you will do afterward in your life the educational status that you will put on the papers whenever you present yourself will define how serious will people perceive you. Having a degree opens many doors and conditions your image in the eyes of others. A startup can wait. Seriously.

In my case, a lot of things suffered:

1. My education took a big blow. I started hating school because it prevented me from working on my startup. I used to skip classes, answer customer emails in class and work on my website/blog posts/ social media when in class. Needless to say, I failed a lot of CATs, exams, and am now repeating some of the units I had failed.
2. My business also took a big hit since I could not dedicate to it the amount of time and effort it needed. Growth was very glacial and this frustrated and stressed me out a lot. I was also a solopreneur and therefore didn’t have anyone to help me out.
3. My social life took a toll as well. I started viewing my peers as ‘unambitious’ because I felt they were too satisfied with the daily grind of school while I wanted something greater than a degree and employment. I also stopped hanging out with them since every spare time I had I dedicated it to my startup.

I suffered on the inside yet had to put on a strong outside front

To cut a long story short and to get back to the focus of my article, I am now experiencing the law of negative returns.

What I mean is this: due to my obsession of building my first failed startup (yes, I had to close it down), I ended up ignoring almost all other aspect of my life.

Suddenly, I have found myself spending almost all my waking hours fixing the messes I had created in the first place.

• I am now repeating units I had failed thus piling even more work on myself in addition to the other units am taking.
• After alienating almost all my friends, am working on rekindling that connection and also making new ones.
• I used my business to distract myself from my depression and I now have to confront it when its much worse yet I could have asked for help and started seeing a counselor earlier.
• And more… (2018 won’t be easy for me, but I will make the best of it).

So, What’s the Point of this article anyway?

Glad you asked.

Get back here ‘point of this article…’

We have all experienced the pain of negative returns one way or another.

Whether it was in the form of:

• creating extra work for ourselves and having to waste resources to fix them
• suffering embarrassment after doing a half-ass job
• alienating our loved ones
• etc…

we need to admit that we humans are capable of fucking up big-time.

More than that, we need to learn how to recognize when we are falling into a pattern of creating negative returns for ourselves. Only then will we be able to take a step back, evaluate our situation, and make the necessary decisions that will propel us forward instead of decisions that will only bring about the pain of regret.

Remember, beware the law of negative returns for she is a cruel teacher who gives the test first, then the lesson afterwards.

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I am The_Amuser and I am sharing musings about life through the eyes of a Kenyan college student on a tight budget :D