How Startup Founders Can Stay Focused During Stressful Times

Being the founder of a startup is a stressful job. You will experience many difficult things such as customers who are not happy with the first version of your product, investors who are upset that you are not making faster financial progress, cash flow issues, litigation, employees that quit, and a list of dozens of other stressful issues. This list of issues is enough to drive a startup founder to have a nervous breakdown. Being a startup founder often feels like sailing a small wooden ship across the Atlantic Ocean during a never ending storm. Sometimes weather will be calm, but there will certainly be some difficult storms.

More experienced founders like me realize that there are a few keys to success when it comes to weathering the storm and building a successful business. Here are some tips:

1. Focus on 90 day goals — one of my favorite books is measure what matters. It was written by a world famous VC who talks about setting annual and quarterly objectives. Setting 90 day business goals is a useful exercise because then you can make sure your daily behaviors are contributing towards these goals. If what you’re doing each day isn’t going to help you accomplish your 90 day goals, then you shouldn’t be doing it.
2. Stay healthy — making sure you get enough exercise, sleep, and that you eat healthy is important. Getting in at least 30–60 minutes of exercise per day will help keep your stress levels low. Being a founder can be stressful which can lead to stress eating. That’s why you should strive for 4–5 servings of fruits and vegetables per day and avoid processed foods. Staying up late at night to work will just lead to poor decisions. Try to work less hours but work on the most important things during those hours.
3. Delegate — founders are only one person. You need to rely on your trusted employees to help you out out fires. You can’t do everything yourself. By delegating to your employees you’ll Be taking a large workload off your plate.
4. Focus on what’s going well — in a startup, it’s very rare to say that things are going well in all aspects of your business. The key to your mental health is to focus on what’s going well. Founders need to be optimists. You should still try to improve what’s not going well, but really do take pride in what’s going well.
5. In healthcare focus on those successful patient stories — many healthcare founders started their companies to help a group of patients with a specific disease. I’m sure you’ve helped many of them now. Take pride in those patient success stories and focus on creating more of them.
6. You can’t control everything — just realize that no matter how hard you work, you can’t control everything. Whether your business outcome is good or bad, it’s not necessarily because of something you did. There is a lot of luck and factors outside of your control in business. You are not God and you can’t control the universe. Do your best in business. Realize you will make mistakes. Try to be kind to people. You’re a human being. And realize you can’t control everything.
7. Never give up! In the end being a founder is rewarding. Think about all the patients you helped and people you already created jobs for!
8. Reflect on progress. Think about where you were 1, 2, 5, or even ten years ago. You may have challenges today, but I bet you’ve made so much progress since you started! The past version of you on day 1 of your company would love to have the problems you are dealing with today. 😀