Founder Mental Health: Why It Matters & What You Can Do About It
Synthesizing Insights From the Data
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Startup Success Is a Marathon, Not a Sprint
Today, we’re diving into a crucial topic that we partially investigated in previous episodes: The often-overlooked importance of maintaining your mental health while dealing with the high-pressure demands of startup life.
Embarking on a 10+ year journey as a founder is no small feat. It requires relentless hard work, dedication, and an unwavering commitment. However, if your mental health starts to deteriorate, it can severely impact your decision-making abilities and make stress management nearly impossible.
With 70 to 100-hour workweeks and an “always on” mentality being the norm, it’s challenging to identify exactly what affects your well-being. With all of the hustle culture, startup stereotypes, and bravado, mental health is often sidelined. While working incredibly hard is an inevitable part of the startup grind, there are ways to approach it that can help minimize the harm to yourself.
For this episode, we will explore the status quo of mental health for founders and what can be done to mitigate negative impacts.
Is It All That Bad?
You might be asking yourself: “Isn't all this stress just part of the game?” Founders are expected to work hard but the potential payback is immense, with successful founders gaining significant societal standing and great financial rewards! Also, wouldn’t you expect the best founders to be more resilient as well?
The short answer is yes. Studies show that harder-working founders produce better outcomes for their companies (Amore & Conti, 2023; Benedetta et al. 2022) and that they usually cluster around certain, more resiliency-prone personality traits (Freiberg & Matz, 2023).
The better answer is: Yes, but there are many considerations: