Being jobless - my six months of transformation

Motivation, Good Stress, Empathy, and Culture...

Recently, I found myself pondering over the shifts in my outlook and daily routine since quitting my job and embarking on my entrepreneurial journey. I took some time to introspect, analysing my gains and losses in the process. As a result, I've decided to share my thoughts on my personal transformation and how I feel about it this week. It is definitely a fortress of solitude — it looks majestic from the outside and lonely inside.

The Myth of Self-Motivation

When people talk about startup founders, they often paint a picture of highly disciplined individuals who wake up early and work late with military precision. But let's be real, that's not always the case. I like to believe that I've always had an innate sense of motivation, but the added responsibility of answering to the team or peers certainly didn't hurt.

Working alone, however, was a different story. Without a concrete timeline and clear goals, I found myself getting easily distracted and lot of netflixing during the first month.

So, what turned things around for me? The answer was simple: hiring a small team. With the addition of an engineer, I suddenly found myself responsible not only for my own success but for the success of someone who had placed their trust in me. This sense of accountability forced me to be more disciplined and responsible, even when I wasn't feeling particularly motivated. So, if you're like me and struggle with discipline, consider positioning yourself as a responsible leader and surround yourself with a team that depends on you for success.

The Good, the Bad, and the Stressful

One question I get asked a lot is whether startup life is stressful. My answer is always the same: it depends on what you mean by stress.

You see, stress is not always a bad thing. In fact, in small doses, it can actually be helpful. It can improve focus, memory, and performance. It can even motivate you to take action and solve problems. But there's a catch. It only works if you're in control of the situation.

However, there are two types of stress - good and bad. Good stress is when you're in control of the variables and can change the outcomes, while bad stress is when you feel helpless to control the situation. It's not the demands of the job that cause the most stress, but rather the degree of control people feel they have throughout their day. Studies have also shown that the effort required by a job is not inherently stressful, but rather the imbalance between the effort we give and the reward we feel.

Personally, I feel less stressed now as a startup founder than I did when I had a job. Even though I'm making less money and working harder in more uncertain and ambiguous problems without high probability of success, I feel more in control of my time and efforts. My Garmin agrees with me on this! So, next time someone asks you if startup life is stressful, remember that it's all about your perception of control.

Empathy, Experience, and comfort zone

One of the major shifts in my job role was that I became more hands-on, doing coding, sending cold emails, and figuring out marketing. This experience helped me gain respect and empathy for job roles that I didn't fully understand before. For example, I now have a greater appreciation for the sales team's perseverance in closing contracts and dealing with multiple rejections daily.

I also discovered the kind of hustle people are capable of when they are motivated enough.

However, falling back into my comfort zone has been a major issue for me. I often found myself preferring to code rather than getting into the unknown territory of product marketing or sales. This tendency hurt both short-term and long-term values. Although I am still struggling with this issue, I have found ways to solve it by avoiding getting too engrossed in product engineering details. One thing that has helped me is having a different schedule for product engineering and marketing-related tasks.

Importance of Values and Culture

Over the past few months, I've developed a set of values that I believe are important to what I want to achieve:

• be restless

• be authentic and vulnerable

• learn tirelessly and execute consistently

• prioritise survival over growth.

Although my team is small, I plan to create a living cultural document in the coming weeks to ensure we stay aligned with these values as we grow and create. There's also the concept of "us vs them" in workplace culture, which can be a whole topic on its own and I'll save that for another post.

In my 15 years of experience, I've observed that what makes a job satisfying or stressful isn't just the work itself, but also the people you work with. It's important to find colleagues who are fun, trustworthy, and dependable.

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To conclude this post, my ultimate goal is not to create a massive, high-growth unicorn or manage a large team. Rather, I aspire to create a work environment where individuals feel inspired to do their best work, where trust and learning are fundamental values, and where everyone feels a sense of fulfilment and satisfaction. Even if we remain a small team, if we can cultivate such a culture, I would consider it a true success.

As I reflect on my journey over last 15 years, I have learned that success means different things to different people. For some, it may be the accumulation of wealth or power, while for others, it may be the ability to make a positive impact on society. Personally, the definition has changed for me over the years and right now, I believe that success is having freedom and time to experiment with life itself. It is about finding purpose and meaning in what you do and striving to make a difference in the world, no matter how small. In the end, in both cosmic and non-cosmic scale, we are insignificant.

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