Leaving the company I co-founded
patjfin.com
patjfin.com
Here is another reminder that world doesn't have to be spinning around startups, making billions and 1000x outcomes.
Perhaps its ok just to be a healthy and mentally stable human being following interests, doing a good job at whatever you do. The world slowly wakes up and realises that perhaps we should celebrate being ok, instead of being exceptional because this is how it usually ends.
All the best to the author. Hope he finds his new thing!
>I think this is the only lasting damage from my startup adventure. My "I didn't study for the exam" dreams have been replaced by "the app is down and no one is responding".
I also left the company I cofounded and even though 15 years have passed, I still get those kind of dreams.
God this brought back some memories because I have had to say the exact same thing to someone, and the memory was just infuriating to think about, and I totally understand how Romy felt saying that. Then as I continued to read what they wrote I realized this person is indeed identical in just about every way (except not the same person).
The person I knew eventually cleaned up their act a bit, and what it came down to was that they were completely obsessed with themselves. A strange kind of narcissism (I know it is trite to say that, but in this case I'll use that word because it isn't obvious how). These problems he is having - extreme fear of failure, essentially - can easily be fixed.
Notice when you read this that he spends paragraphs and paragraphs going on about how he feels. When he talks about how he is letting everyone down, it is never about how he is letting everyone down or how they feel, it is how it makes him sad that they are sad. How stressed he is. How he isn't a quitter. Notice how when he talks about leaving emails unanswered for weeks the first thing on his mind is how sad it makes him to make life difficult for everyone even though he could simply answer the email. It isn't how hard it must be for them, it is how sad it makes him that things are difficult for them.
Now there is nothing wrong with worrying about your own feelings, but this kind of self destructive event which he describes came about solely because he was taking himself too seriously. In fact, he was completely and totally obsessed with himself above all else which lead to a complete and total neglect of everyone and everything he was responsible for. If anyone you know ever ends up this paralyzed from fear of failure just try to remind them to stop taking themselves so seriously and try worrying about something other than themselves for once.
The author comes to similar revelations in the post: “My perspective shifts. I realize how incredibly self centered I’ve been. How irrational it is to be worrying about how everyone else perceives my decisions and apparent failures.” Reflection can take time and it’s often a natural part of growth.
I think this post is more about burnout. Your over-analysis of their “self destructive event” comes to the wrong conclusion. Not responding to emails when you are completely burnt out has nothing to do with your obsession with yourself. When you’re completely burnt out you go into self preservation mode and while that might appear like self obsession, that is a symptom of burnout, not the cause.
It wouldn't even occur to a narcissist that they're making things difficult for someone else. If you have a voice in your head telling you that you should feel guilty about all the ways in which you're making things hard for others... sure you might have an anxiety or a burnout problem, but you clearly have empathy.
If you believe that something you're doing is making things difficult for people you care about, it's not narcissistic (even in the common usage) for that thought to make you sad -- that's just how empathy works. Empathy works by making you feel bad when your brain thinks other people are feeling bad.
If that thought never even occurs to you, and if your friends repeatedly tell you things like "when you do X, it makes things difficult for me because I then have to do A, B, and C, when I could have just done Y" -- but you are still unable to wrap your head around or even acknowledge this, then you might be a narcissist.
Describing in detail how something made you feel isn't narcissism or arrogance... it's the author's stated reason for writing this piece, and it doesn't seem like he's fishing for pity points. If you're not interested, that's fine... you don't have to finish reading it, but other people can find it helpful to compare how they feel in their current situation to how the author felt then.
In particular, that feeling of "I can clearly see how my own issues are causing problems for my team -- I can see that they're frustrated with me, and I really want to fix things, both for them and for myself, but I don't know how and I feel stuck" is pretty common.
It's not necessarily self-centered to have the meta-discussion about how this thought makes you feel, because this "feeling like a failure" is often driving a positive feedback loop that turns a few relatively manageable issues into an insurmountable monster. You need to understand what this feeling is doing to you in order to have any hope of fixing yourself.
I also want to add, to the GP, it's inappropriate and insensitive to say that the authors problem is easily fixed. And even assuming the authors main problem is narcissism, which I doubt, your methods would be laughably ineffective.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Internet Psychiatric Diagnosis (IPD) is particularly to be avoided.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...
* https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308
From my own experience, there is significant overlap between burnout and depression. The root causes are different, but the symptoms are the same. The echos I hear are based on having experienced both.
If you have never experienced either, it's hard to understand how completely they alter personality and decision making. Seemingly mundane problems become insurmountable. Trivial items become weirdly important, and critical items become... not quite ignorable, but hard to prioritize.
It's very hard to behave reasonably when you feel like you're lost and drowning. Instead of making simple and obvious decisions, I found myself making completely irrational decisions. Looking back a couple decades later, some of my decisions were bafflingly silly. Others were tragic. In all cases, my decisions were based on overwhelming emotion not logic, experience, or my personal priorities.
Perhaps you've gone two or three days without sleeping, and noticed yourself behaving like you were drunk but tired. Now take away the loss of coordination, increase the loss of executive control, and let it sneak up on you over months or years. That's the best I can describe the experience to anyone that hasn't had it themselves.
I found the author's essay beautiful, cathartic, and helpful. It helped me to empathize with what he'd experienced, and reminded me how complex we each are as human beings. It gave me new things to think about as I consider my own career path and life. And it was interesting seeing the last two years of COVID from a European's perspective compared to my midwestern American perspective.
In other words, from my perspective the essay was an example of humility and generosity, and I'm grateful for it. If we were all so willing to examine and share our inner experiences, perhaps the world would be a slightly easier place to live.
All I can say is that the person I knew said that the number one thing they did to help fix the problem was, that whenever they started feeling stressed and overwhelmed, they would say to themselves "What is happening right now isn't about you".
Your take makes a lot of sense to me too. Perhaps they are completely different things that we are describing. Perhaps they are the same thing seen from a different perspective.
And tbh I understand people having different reactions to it. I can’t really speak to what it’s like to be the other founder in this situation but I can imagine it’s very rough.