Health and Entrepreneurship

This is honestly one of the harder things I’ve written about. Mostly because I’ve done it wrong in the past, and am working on doing it right. It’s one of those things that’s so easy to get wrong, but actually pretty important to get right.

It centers around one important fact: your health and your company are competing priorities. It’s tempting to go all-in on company and ignore health, but ultimately that will be at the detriment of company (in the long run).

When you’re an entrepreneur, the way you treat your health is essentially negatively correlated with the pressure you put on yourself to perform. More investors, more employees, more customers = more pressure, so essentially it always gets harder. The more pressure you put on yourself to perform, the more likely you are to sacrifice health to get there. It’s ok to skip the gym if you have a big customer meeting in the morning. Or if you win a big deal or close an investor, more likely you are to go out for a drink to celebrate.

Mistakes I made during my first company was to raise, a lot. The problem with that is it puts unrealistic expectations on to perform. “I’m expecting this company to be 100x” was not an uncommon thing I heard from investors. Raising more money also means you hire more employees, which also puts on pressure to make the company successful. That actually hurt our performance because I was willing to put a lot more on the line to get there, including things like skipping the gym and eating poorly to push more out of my productivity.

I think the main thing to focus on is negative and positive coping mechanisms: how do you cope with the pressure? Negative coping mechanisms include pushing it hard at the office on a Friday, eating poorly, drinking, smoking weed etc. There are a lot of vices that can help you get away from the core problem: you’re not meeting expectations.

On the flip side, there are positive coping mechanisms. My cofounder for flyflow runs every morning as a release for that pressure. I actually really like that as a way to get through the pressure, just push yourself physically.

Startups are hard, and you need to be playing the long game to really make it. Health is no exception.