Week 22: Now it's personal

Just before I sat down to this week’s newsletter, a new founder asked me, “When you start a company, how do you avoid feeling a strong sense of personal attachment to its success or failure?”

I didn’t get much done this week—I dramatically underestimated how much rest I’d need after a challenging life event—so I’ll use this week’s edition to answer that question.

The mental game flaw

When you feel like your success as a person is on the line, you’re suffering a mental game flaw. In other words, you can view the situation anyway you want, but your default view doesn’t reflect reality.

I like to solve mental game flaws by writing down these four things:

1. What I’m feeling

2. Why it’s logical that I feel that way

3. Why that feeling isn’t actually logical

4. What the correction is

Here’s 3 of those flaws, and what I think their corrections are.

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#1: It feels like there is no one else to blame

Why that seems logical: When you venture out on your own, you can’t hide behind anyone else. You can’t ask anyone else to do the work. If it succeeds, it’s because of your own effort. It it fails, it’s because of what you did, too.

The flaw in that thinking: your company can fail for reasons that aren’t your fault. You can fail because of bad luck and bad variance. Moreover, when you work for someone else, a project usually succeeds or fails at the hands of a very small number of people. The situation isn’t different when you’re starting from scratch.

The correction: no matter where you work, there’s never anyone else to blame. Plus, there is skill in recognizing when you’ve encountered bad luck. If you learn to recognize it, you can know you were doing the right thing even if the outcome was bad.

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#2: My failures are more evident to the public

Why that seems logical: If you’re the only member of a company, people will see through the corporate name and associate success or failure with you, not with the company.

The flaw in that thinking: People have a much shorter attention span than you think, and no one will remember projects you launched that didn’t take off. Plus, big companies suffer failures all the time. It’s just easier for them to obscure what really happened.

The correction: Failures happen at companies of every size. Plus, mistakes are critical for learning, which you must make in order to grow.

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#3: The opportunity cost feels bigger

Why that seems logical: When you work for yourself, you feel in the impact of coasting much more. You know when you’re wasting time and could be doing something productive.

The flaw in that thinking: Your opportunity cost is the same no matter what you’re doing. And if you’re working for someone else, it’s easy trick yourself into wasting time. Think about all the 1:1s you don’t really need to have. All the meetings where you’re checked out. All the projects you know aren’t going anywhere.

The correction: The more aware of wasting time you are, the more likely you are to put that time to something useful.