A System For Surviving Startups (And Life)
Startups are basically black holes. They swallow up everything that comes with their gravitational field. They will consume all of your time, money, energy and still have room for more. As with black holes, this makes them fascinating, irresistible, and, frankly, deadly.
Founders have the hubris to believe that they can do it all. Secret — we’re not nearly as capable as we like to convince ourselves. That hubris just mean that we can disrupt massive giants, it means that we believe we can have everything, all at the same time. The even bigger joke — we’re sure that our experience of those things is unchanged.
When you’re young and stupid, you’re actually probably right — you have infinite energy and determination with minimal need for interruption. It’s no wonder that the venture world loves the 20-something plot line so much. They want beasts that eat, shit, sleep startup.
Put some mileage on the odometer and things change. Be it time, illness or a change in fortune (good or bad), eventually you realize that startup and sacrifice are synonyms — blood brothers, even. Surrender quickly can consume your steady mind and brew the guilt and suffering that many of us eventually come to regret in realtime and resent in retrospect.
Get a system or get dead.
The Four Fs System
Millions of dollars and tens of thousands of hours later, I’m sure I’ve found a solution to this problem. It’s got nothing to do with finding more time in the day and everything to do with learning how to spin plates.
It’s the 4 Fs.
The Four Fs
The heart of this system is super simple. It attempts to distill down the things that truly matter to 4 distinct buckets. They are as follows:
- Founder — your responsibility to your company. Substitute Function if you’re not a founder, it’s your work all the same.
- Family — your responsibility to your family, either upstream or downstream from you
- Friend — your relationships to your acquaintances, friends, and other cherished beings
- Fun — your desire to enjoy life, whatever form it may take
Each of these is critical to your mental and physical health. None is more important than the other, however. Their priority is personal.
Founder
Founders cares about the success of their company, the well-being of their employees, and everything in between. Founders are insatiable when it comes to carving out their own success.
Your work provides you the financial means to attain security and other pursuits. Your function also provides intellectual fulfillment — the feeling of success and accomplishment that gives us courage in new things.
Family
Family gives us roots and provides us with both a history and future to identify with. Families come in many different shapes and sizes, having their own strengths and weaknesses. Our commitment to our family is complex, to say the least.
Family is automatic and, sadly, the most likely candidate to be taken for granted. Family takes work, just like everything else.
Friend
Friendship embodies a great deal of our identity. While we can’t choose our family, we certainly build our web of friendships to reflect the things we value as we evolve. Friendship is our link to society.
Friendship, like family, be taken for granted and require work to be sustained. Much like with customers, keeping existing friends is significantly easier than forming new ones. Don’t let the ones that matter slip.
Fun
Fun is the connective tissue of life. Fun doesn’t mean laughing, but isn’t it great when it does? Fun represents all the things that tantalize our hearts and minds.
While we can have fun on our own, it’s so much better when it’s shared.
The Four Ms
Now that we know what the Four Fs are, it’s important to know the rules, the 4 Ms:
- Minimize — guilt is inevitable, keep it to a minimum
- Master — master one, then two, then more
- Mix — blend what’s the most important to get the most
- Mistakes — no one is perfect, rinse and repeat
Minimize Guilt
The hardest rule of all is the first. Guilt is the number one reason that we feel like shit when we neglect one of our core Fs. We’re here because we’re pursuing a life with balance — and balance ain’t easy and it doesn’t come free.
Swallow the guilt and understand that before you can go up, you’re gonna stay still. Make it clear to everyone else what you’re up to and pray they’ll understand. Once you can forgive yourself for how you feel, you can make progress towards your true goal.
Dedicate your efforts to making it to multiples
Master One First
Success is like learning how to spin plates or juggle. No one starts with a dozen chainsaws. When you learn how to juggle, you start with one ball. Sure you may know how to catch it, but you need to know how to catch it the right way.
Master one thing, then start to plot which one matters most next. Only when you’ve gotten to a place where you feel in control of the chaos can you even truly dedicate yourself to improving elsewhere. It takes time, but don’t get complacent either.
Mastery takes time, be prepared to hack it.
Mix It Up
Let’s be honest, you’re gonna be impatient. It will sometimes feel like you’ll never be able to master any of these things. Don’t worry, you will, but until then — hack it.
Finding ways to co-mingle your most important things goes a long way. It lets you make the most of your Maybe it’s doing walking meetings to get time and it doesn’t keep the rest of your life on pause for nearly as long.
Here’s just a few ways to mix and re-mix things:
- Do walking meetings to get some fitness into work
- Workout with your friends or family
- Dedicate lunch to catching up with someone instead of scarfing down your work
- Work with people you love!
- Turn work events into micro parties
- Build bridges between your friends and family — peer pressure for you to get involved
Mistakes Happen
You can’t control chaos, you can just not let it control you. No matter how hard we press to get the universe in order, the truth is that we’ll be needed in one place more than another at different points in time. Deal with it.
Give priority to what pains you most, to what you miss the most, to what you need the most. Life has a good way of telling you which is which. Once you sort that out, repeat the process to get back on track.
Good news — once you’ve mastered the process, the second, third and hundredth time are easier and easier.
As with all advice, take all of this with a grain of rice. I can’t promise this works for anyone, but I’ve seen this pattern emerge more than enough times to know that it can work for a lot of people — if they try.
I hope this can help you.
Special thanks to my friends Jeremiah Owyang who helped me articulate this for the first time out loud and Brian Solis who reminded me how important it was to share.
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Gregarious Narain is a serial entrepreneur and product strategist. A reformed designer and developer, He writes on his experiences as a founder, strategist, and father on the regular. Connect with him on LinkedIn or say hi on Twitter.
