An honest discussion regarding the health of startup founders, and how your company may slowly be killing you.
“ People look for retreats for themselves, in the country, by the coast, or in the hills . . . There is nowhere that a person can find a more peaceful and trouble-free retreat than in his own mind. . . . So constantly give yourself this retreat, and renew yourself. ”
— MARCUS AURELIUS
Read that above for a second…
Ask yourself, how often as a startup founder do you wreck yourself mentally trying to find new ways to grow?
And how often do you sacrifice your own mental and physical health for the well being of your company?
We all do it, and we have to stop it. (within reason, because I know you won’t )
“But Bryan, if i don’t stop my company will crumble like Ancient Rome. “And sleep? LOL, I need to code 22 hours a day to raise this seed round so I can buy my Lambo and live the life of a Silicon Valley Unicorn.”
Hell, I own an employee performance platform and I still deprive myself of sleep, ingest way too much caffeine and skip workouts!
So the big question here is; how do you grind, scale your business, but not burn every physical and emotional bridge you have in your life?
To do that, let’s take a look into the world of Sports Science and see how top athletes manage stress, and perform on a world stage:
In athletics, managing total allostatic or stress load is the goal for any sport. Ultimately, making sure an athlete is emotionally and physically prepared to perform at a high level is the focus of not only the Coach, but also the Performance Manager, Physio and the Medical Team.
Millions of dollars are spent every year to build recovery centers, to implement blood testing, to hire Sports Psychologists, and to utilize physiological monitoring technology.
Teaching athletes how to handle stress at home, how to recover at work and how to manage psycho-social pressures, is necessary to maintain top tier performance.
All because: a stressed out, broken down athlete does not win gold medals or world titles….
So why do you think that putting yourself into the ground will get you that Series A???
Let me ask you:
If you answered YES to any of these questions, we might need to fix some things!
So what are the signs and symptoms that might indicate that I’m over doing it?
Utilizing Carl Valle’s (a high level performance coach, and an innovator in the world of Tech/Sports Science) thought process, you need to look at 4 primary checkpoints to assess possible general fatigue:
How do you fix these issues, and what are some modalities I can implement right away?
This role of a startup founder is to PERFORM! You sitting on the sidelines, beat up and injured, does no one good. Allow yourself to recover, and watch how your mental, physical and company performance GROW.