How To Thrive Consistently As An Entrepreneur

It’s been over a month into my full-time entrepreneurial journey.

Opposite to what I envisioned, I find myself once again being depressed and feeling lost in the pursuit of my ventures. I couldn’t put myself together and started crying several hours a day. I doubted every idea that entered in my mind until I started questioning the meaning of everything. My visions and beliefs seem eroded away by everyday struggles:

1. Three of my close friends think my mastermind group and attack therapy idea is a joke

2. I wasted two hours on the phone for reimbursement and billing

3. I didn’t publish content with the quality and quantity I expected

4. I failed to get up early for more than a week

5. I’ve been binge eating and gained weight visually

6. My YouTube Stopped growing

7. My writing stopped growing

8. It took me three days instead of 3 hours to fix some payment integration for my website, and still end up not fully automated

9. I didn’t do workout in the past two weeks and my lower back started hurting

10. etc…

You got the idea. It’s a waste of time to even write down this list.

I couldn’t fathom how weak and slow I turned out to be compared to what I believed myself to be. I had clear vision, I had self-discipline, I had days where I am ready to make things happen and no one can convince me otherwise (unless you kill me, literally)

Then, something happened. Idk when, how or what, but something happened and I lost my momentum.

Luckily, I’ve been in the darkness before, I’m not tempted to visit it again just because I have some unanswered questions. I was sneakily thinking I can trade some long term mental fitness for the immediate productivity. Once again, I was reminded the physical law: “If I stop going to gym, I lose my muscles”.

When I accumulated enough long-term sacrifice for short-term progress, the short-term goal won’t be achieved either. The second day I couldn’t get up at 5 am, I should know I will have meltdown two weeks down the road.

This time, I learned my definition of “being yourself“. Along with some other “realizations“ that l “accepted“ the hard way. I hope the following list can help you stay mentally fit and thrive consistently as an entrepreneur. I believe we all carry answers inside us, but it takes environment to expose them.

1. The Problem Of “Being Yourself“

As a content creator and entrepreneur, I naturally want to be a great communicator. However, “being a good communicator“ requires you to “be yourself”, because, only then, you can reserve your energy to focus on the actual communication.

However, the problem is, how the hell to know “who I am ??!!“

I’m NOT a philosopher or prodigy. I’m a 32 year old mediocre Asian female, who suffered from the problematic education system in China, inherited the limited understanding of the world based on middle-class norms, and experienced various physical and mental abuse from her families. It simply didn’t occur to my mind what I was doing with my life until one day I backed myself to the corner and read it out:

“You wasted 30 years of life”.

It’s like first time opening my eyes from a 30 years coma. I got up late. Now, I’m asked to “be myself“. Well, I simply don’t have the data to back up whatever I think I am, because my past 30 years was spent with “coma”.

If I know who I am, I would have already been successful in my own ways.

When we think of a question, we tend to frame them as if it has a binary answer. “I know“ or “I don’t know“. That’s the biggest issue an idea like “being your self“ impose. It accidentally put a dynamic and complex space under a static lens. Yeah, I thought I knew what I was 8 years ago when I came to USA alone. I was proven wrong. Then I thought earned the answer 2 years ago when I got paid to be a machine learning engineer. Again, I thought I discovered the answer a month ago when I decided to stay unemployed and work on my ventures full-time.

No, no, no. The world has much more to offer than a static answer. That would be so boring for an explorer like me. I can’t stop wondering “If it’s easy, do I still want to do it?“

My answers are consistently “NO“.

I still don’t know who I am, what I represent, what I will be or even where I want to be.

What I learned from this past mental issue relapse is “it’s OK to not know the answer, especially when the question is so important that I am 100% sure I SHOULD know my own answer, but, I don’t“.

If my nature is to explore, why should I force myself to stay in one identity?

Whether my answer ends up being a writer, a filmmaker, a storyteller, an entrepreneur, a therapist or just a friend, sitting there and reasoning wouldn’t provide me more data.

What would provide me more data?

Every morning getting up at 5 am does. Enjoying a delicious dinner with my husband does. Rinsing and repeating after failures does. Things I have control over, no matter how small they are.

Action is the cure to obsessive thinking. Not more thinking. As for the idea of “being yourself“, let me just throw it out of the window.

I don’t want to “BE“ myself, I want to “BUILD“ myself.

To have the patience of building myself, I need tons of self-love. Unfortunately, like many other folks, I didn’t inherit that from my parents. Therefore, I have to learn how to do that now. (No, having one more cup of iced coffee isn’t self-love! Put down your McDonald's coupon!)

This leads to my next point.

2. Reroute Self-Critique To Self-Compassion, Not Depression

Have you heard of this power chain in subjects at school? If you want to understand biology, learn chemistry => If you want to understand chemistry, learn physics => you want to understand physics, learn math => if you want to understand math, learn philosophy.

(what if you want to understand philosophy? god knows)

Anyway, I find we have similar power chain in our emotions. If you constantly feel stressed, you got anxiety => If you constantly feel anxious, you got meltdown => If you constantly got meltdown, you got sadness => If you constantly feel sad, congrats! You reached the final boss: depression!

That is the emotion route many of us have. I find it pretty inconvenient. Every time I am trying to achieve something, I get … stressed. da, da, da. You guessed the rest.

Since depression leads to suicide. That must NOT be the winning of a game.

Let’s try again.

So, we started with stress. What do we do when we have stress?

We TRY NOT be stressed. A quick way to do this is to blame others OR blame ourselves. Although neither one fixes the root cause, that’s the default routing of our brain. As we age, we learned that blaming others will always come back to ourselves, so we stop doing that. However, the harder lesson lies in blaming ourselves.

Can you always accept what you have done wrong to others?

I was in a farewell dinner for a friend who was leaving for a better job opportunity. Naturally, we started talking about job market, and I shared my depressing view about being a biologist. My friend reminded me twice that one guy in the dinner is still a biologist, but I failed to consider his feeling and continued talking about my “honest view“.

A year later, during one of my mental down spirals, I suddenly realized how terrible I was and I couldn’t bear me being such an asshole, just as my mom always says. I felt this urge to find this guy again so I can apologize to him.

After some back and forth messaging, I realized that urge comes from getting rid of that mental burden rather than internalizing my mistake. I realized I didn’t have the self-compassion needed to internalize my past mistakes.

That is the weight of self-critique.

The critique itself isn’t wrong. We hedge ourselves against repeating our own mistakes by self-awareness and self-regulation, which are among the most admirable traits a human can have. However, without self-compassion, those self-reflection will eventually collapse our mental health.

Rather than getting rid of that shame immediately, I decided to carry it with me so I can remind myself not be an asshole again. Self-compassion is a indispensable skill for entrepreneurs. We have to get over themselves sooner or later.

3. “Wanting” Is The Shortcut To Pop My Invisible Bubble

Looking at my best moves in previous life, they were not motivated by noble or passionate reasons. They were made because I was desperate and scrappy. I didn’t set out to become a great biology researcher, I was just running away from my family. I didn’t do LeetCode because I love solving problems, I did them because I needed a well-paid job.

More often than not, my “wanting“ is a consequence of me NOT knowing what I want and imitating other people’s desires. That sounds sinful, but it moves me forward in getting better understanding of the society and myself. For example, to get my startup idea off the ground, I conducted dozens of customer interviews. The more people I talk to, the more I realized what a bubble my life had been in. If I didn’t care about the startup idea enough, I wouldn’t have to force myself to understand others. It’s my desire for my personal gain driving my understanding of others. When we work for things we hold dearest, our integrity is under the most intense stress test.

4. When Starting A New Venture, Cut Off Some Old Friends Mentally

It sounds harsh to cut off some friends, because it is. We identify ourselves through our relationships and friends are the big part of them. One of the sweetest thing in life is to relish those moments shared with friends.

However, when we decided to shoot for new ventures, there will be a discrepancy between our old image and our new image. This discrepancy can become a burden if we want to appear “consistent“ or to be understood by that same group of friends. When we are still figuring things out and trying to a new way of living, we are left with very limited bandwidth to take care of other things. If we prioritize our relationship with others instead of the relationship with ourselves, we may risk pulling ourselves back or revisiting unnecessary self-doubts. One way to alleviate the pain is to allow more distance in our relationships, so we can have enough room for ourselves to explore and grow.

5. If Social Media Is Part Of Your Work, Track Your Information Diet.

With all more and more tedious tasks being replaced by technology, creative work and social media continue enjoying the increase in interest from both business and the mass. To stay productive, many of us would fight against consuming “brainless“ social media content by limiting our screen time, etc. However, content creation for social media is part of the daily work for many entrepreneurs, so simply avoiding it is not an option for us.

I tried stop consuming online content for a while. It did help. However, when I accidentally watched a funny video, it’s even more stimulating than it was before. Some funny video or non-sense conversations can stick in my head for days. I had hard time getting rid of those distracting noises. Eventually, I realized I will always have inner voices going on. If it’s not motivational speech, it will be funny memes. Rather than abstain myself from all online content, I should proactively choose what to consume with moderation, so I have the lesser useless voice in my head.

Mental corruption is the highest risk as an entrepreneur. Our result driven mindset can leave us hopelessly narrow-minded and stuck. I hope you find the article helpful for your journey. I am organizing a mastermind group for people who are transitioning from highly technical background. Feel free to email me at [email protected] if you are interested in being part of this group.