Unrealistic expectations led me to emotional burnout

I hold a deeply ingrained belief that I can achieve almost anything I desire. When I decide to pursue something, a large part of me assumes I will succeed quite rapidly. I now recognize that I apply this framework: want -> pursuit -> expectations for quick success to a wide variety of goals.

For example, I learned how to surf last year. It took about 8 consecutive sessions to really get the hang of it. I’m not good, but I can definitely surf. My framework led to fairly accurate expectations of the timeline from want -> achievement.

Another example. Yesterday I tried to learn a JavaScript framework called React. I figured I would pick it up in a couple of hours and conclude by building a simple website with it. I’m not a good programmer and have no idea why I assumed I could learn it so quickly. Expectation ≠ reality.

(In retrospect) I’ve also applied this framework to founding a startup. Unlike surfing, it will probably take more than 15 hours of work to achieve some level of success. In fact, it will probably take more than several months to achieve some level of success. My understanding of the startup literature suggests it will take at least 5 years, but probably closer to 10 to achieve the desired outcome. And by the way, I have no prior experience, minimal technical skill, and no strongly held ideas for the business. It’s fair to say that founding a startup is an ~ambitious~ endeavor for me.

I did not explicitly recognize the massive discrepancy between my expectations for startup success and my probabilistic success timeline until yesterday. Unfortunately, it took a large and protracted amount of psychological anguish for me to arrive at this conclusion, but arrived we have. Fortunately I’ve never had to deal with depression, but this divergence between my expectations and my reality gave me a taste 🤮.

So what to do now? First, I need to calm the fuck down and remember why I wanted to do this in the first place. In my 2022 goals post I wrote that I was pursuing entrepreneurship because:

I think I have an intrinsic desire to find out what I’m made of, and entrepreneurship is one form of (safely) testing myself and my capacity – it is hard.
It provides a lot of financial upside, if successful. This element clearly leans towards extrinsic desire, but I do need to make more money at some point.
I can’t think of anything else I would rather pursue

In hindsight maybe those aren’t the strongest reasons for deciding how to spend the bulk of my time, but they all remain true.

Some personal reminders:

• Set SMALL goals
  • Maintaining momentum is crucial. Achieving small (even seemingly insignificant) goals can provide the positive stimulus to push on
• Focus on the process and getting a little better every day
  • I can only control my inputs (reach out to 10 potential customers) vs my outputs (acquire 5 new customers)
• Let yourself off the hook
  • If entrepreneurship were easy, everyone would do it…

Men will literally share their feelings on the internet instead of going to therapy…