accelerating self-growth

I wrote last time about intentionally doing things that are difficult. One of the recent themes I’ve discovered is the concept of accelerating self-discovery. I realized that this is one huge benefits of starting a company – the enormous pace of self-discovery. I define this in three ways:

1) Learning Skills

Founders can never have enough skills when starting a company, and our desperate need to learn those skills forces us to develop them rapidly, on the fly. Humans have innately an extraordinary ability to adapt, yet to unleash this power, we must be given a reason to adapt. A startup is a reason to learn at ten times the rate that any other job would allow.

2) Learning Preferences

When there’s only a few people involved, each person’s responsibility spans a much broader range than a typical role-based job. Right now I split my time between customer marketing, operations, business development , and product development (among other things). Quite naturally, I don’t love every bit of it – some things appeal to me more than others. My awareness of the things I like and dislike is invaluable in my quest to discover what I want to spend the rest of my life doing. By exposing myself to dozens of roles at once, I accelerate the pace of that self-discovery

3) First Coping & then Excelling Mentally

The hardest parts of starting a company are all mental. Entrepreneurs deal with a tremendous amount of fear, risk, and stress every day. They learn how to cope with the huge weight of the expectations of co-founders, investors, employees and customers, and looming threat of failure. Confronting this mental challenge is the most thrilling part of starting a company – by the time you’re done, your mind is tough. Your maturity in dealing with setbacks, conflict, stress and fear is ten-fold what it would have been had you stayed in a regular job.

Now you may ask why – why go to all the trouble to do this? You’re right to ask, and it’s a very personal decision. My answer is that this is what I want from my life – I want to experience the fullest range of physical, mental and emotional experience possible, and leave this world knowing myself as deeply as I possibly can.