Worry about the things you can control
One of the hardest things about being a startup founder is worrying about all the ‘known unknowns’ and the fear of how many ‘unknown unknowns’ might also be lurking out there, waiting to strike.
Should I apply to enter that accelerator program? Will our cost of acquiring a customer ever exceed our average revenue per customer? What will happen to new customer growth when we hit our first holiday season? How do I value my startup before trying to raise capital?
I won’t go on, because there’s millions of them and just writing them makes me anxious!
It’s obviously a bad thing to spend all your waking hours (and maybe some of the hours you should be sleeping) worrying about all these things. It creates stress which can damage your physical and mental health, it can degrade your decision-making abilities, it can affect your relationships with family, friends and colleagues.
Since multi-tasking is not actually a thing, any minute you spend worrying about something is also a minute you could spend making, calculating, researching, writing or pitching something that could help you make progress. It might even answer some of your known unknowns, or bring an unknown unknown out from under the bed.
My wife Melissa taught me (actually, is still teaching me) two strategies:
- To focus on worrying about things I can do something about; and
- To pivot from worrying about those things into acting on addressing those things.
See, if you’re just worrying about the things you know about and can do something about, that’s immediately a much shorter list of things. And if it’s a list of things you can actually do something about, it gives you the opportunity to start unpacking how to address each thing. Taking action is scary but less stressful than worrying.
Luckily for me, I’m not the kind of person who worries about needing to write something (though I frequently suffer from procrastination and miss a deadline.) So writing a list of things I need to do helps me sort things into two lists – things I know I can do something about now, and things that are dependent on me doing something about something else first.
That’s what I’m doing right now, on a flight to Melbourne to pitch some potential investors in M8 Ventures — I’m preventing myself from worrying about things I can’t do anything about right now (like, negotiating with an AFSL holder) by listing the things that need to happen before that (like collecting a minimum of AUD7 million in ‘soft commitments’ from investors to allow us to apply for conditional ESVCLP status).
There’s no point me worrying about how the AFSL negotiations will go until we’ve got commitments for AUD7 million. And that much money is way more than I’ve ever personally raised before. That’s right: just like the startup founders I meet all week long, I’m shitting myself about raising money, and what would make me most anxious (if I let it) is worrying about what happens if we’re successful raising the money.
Another important thing I’ve learned is to take time to review what I’ve achieved in each time I work like this. Startup life can easily blur into a three-to-five year rush of panic, stress, late nights and early mornings if you don’t stop to look at what you’ve done. I slip into anxiety if I don’t take a moment to see what I’ve achieved. And since there’s always something I could be doing to make progress in every waking hour, I find it easier to give myself permission to take a time out if I can recognise that I’ve made progress.
So if you struggle with startup anxiety, try this:
- Worry about the things you can make progress on today (or this morning, or on this plane flight, or in the next hour, or before the next meeting).
- Pivot from worrying about them to listing them. Sort them either by how long you think they’ll take to make progress on them, or how important they really are.
- Now pick them off one by one. Stop when you said you were going to stop.
- Review your progress at the end of the time you’ve allocated.
- Blog about what works for you and what doesn’t, so you’re paying it forward.
