meditation

In general, I am a cautious person. I am a bit worried about the unknown. And I do distrust common perceptions. This helps in certain areas, but that also leads a much blander life.

Given my general attitude towards life, it is indeed a great paradox that I firmly believe in startups. To put my money where my mouth is, I quit my full time job last year and joined people who I trust to start a startup. That should tell you how much I trust the people I work with and how much I liked my previous job .

Startups, they say, are all about perseverance. In Founders at work, each of the founders Jessica interviewed talked about perseverance. Each one. They talk that there is only thing that matters for a startup. Perseverance. Nothing more. Nothing less. You could have the greatest technology on earth, but you have to wait. Be patient. Let it happen. The inside story of Ev Williams’ sufferings when he ran Blogger are read to be believed.

So there I was, fully knowing that startups are full of uncertainty, still trying to start one. I was working happily churning out code without fighting the tools or processes, just focused on getting the job done, which is why I love startups. Months passed.

Paul Graham, in his How not to die essay says this:

“If so many startups get demoralized and fail when merely by hanging on they could get rich, you have to assume that running a startup can be demoralizing. That is certainly true. I’ve been there, and that’s why I’ve never done another startup. The low points in a startup are just unbelievably low. I bet even Google had moments where things seemed hopeless.”

So true. A few months into the startup, I was lying in the bed, waking up at 2 am and 1 am and staring at the ceiling. The stress was building up. Along with stress, comes Stress eating. I was bloating inch by inch.

At some point, I hit the fat wall and started running.

The unthinkable started to happen. The stress started to vanish. I was going back ‘doing the startup’ for the enjoyment part of it. It was clear that sweating over the startup was going to be pretty demoralizing and along with that comes, in PG’s words:

When startups die, the official cause of death is always either running out of money or a critical founder bailing. Often the two occur simultaneously. But I think the underlying cause is usually that they’ve become demoralized. You rarely hear of a startup that’s working around the clock doing deals and pumping out new features, and dies because they can’t pay their bills and their ISP unplugs their server.

Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. So keep typing!

Yes, I was back to typing in full glory.

While going through this, I had a sense of Deja vu. In many ways, it is a head fake that late Prof. Randy Pausch had talked about in his last lecture.

The primary reason of doing a startup is to experience a challenge that is so intense and compresses a life-time of work experiences into a very short period of time. It is the rush, the satisfaction of doing something difficult with so little resources and creating something. It is a sense of achievement.

Running, was providing me that sense of achievement. When I started, I barely could run 50 feet. Ten weeks into the program, I was running 3 miles at a stretch. Each day was better than the previous one. Each day a new accomplishment.

Once this thought process happened at a macro level with respect to two potentially life style changing events, I started applying it micro level activities.

Suddenly, it was clear that the object of doing the startup was not to raise funding from VCs, become a successful company and get rich quick. The real object was to have fun, explore ones own limits and create something new, create value for customers and solve problems. At the next level it meant typing more code, getting into the zone a lot more and enjoying coding. Everything else follows suit.

Likewise, even though the primary objective of running was to lose weight and feel fit, instead of sweating over the weight machine and swearing at it, I started setting enjoyable, tangible goals. “I am going to run for 30 mins tomorrow”. “I am going to run 4 miles this weekend”. Weight loss followed. The head fake works.

It seems like such a powerful tool. For any difficult problem you face, find out tangible, enjoyable short-term goals. They become your ‘head fake’. The bigger problem eventually will get solved by solving these short-term goals.

Thanks Prof. Pausch. I am glad I didn’t miss your last lecture.

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