Keep Emotions Out of Your Startup
startupbox.posthaven.com
startupbox.posthaven.com
Emotions like joy, trust, interest and surprise are critical to engagement with customers. Marketing is basically raising interest. Product deals with the rest. The CEO broadcasts all of them, if he's good at his job.
You also can't keep negative emotions from injecting themselves at the most inopportune time. How you handle those negative emotions, on the other hand, has far reaching implications.
As you said, running any successful enterprise depends on being aware of your emotions, your customers emotions, your collaborators emotions. You can't treat emotions as some alien thing you can ignore until they go away. All that will do is poison your project.
The whole article is based on a false premise imo. There are a myriad of reasons why I would, or wouldn't listen to a suggestion from someone else.
The best I can do at least, is to listen to everyone, and try the often repeated suggestions, but if you are implementing every whim a customer suggests, you probably aren't operating optimally.
I wish I could figure out how to turn this into a win(us)-(lose)them, into a win-win (because there could be an upside, like building a movement), but what people are demanding is in direct conflict of their behaviors (and our growth) so there little actualized incentive on our part except for maybe trying to exacerbate the issues more with a new feature in order to get more growth.
The author seems to be in the fortunate position of never having suffered from feedback overload.
In my experience, anyone is willing to give feedback when asked for it, and most of that feedback will be wrong and/or conflicting with the advice of others and/or inapplicable to the situation at hand.
As a founder, it is your privilege and your duty to free yourself from the opinions of others and blaze your own trail.
The lesson when/where emotions are involved should be to develop your empathy.. now that will open up you mind & provide clarity!