Have Limits

You devote your entire existence to starting a company. You’re willing to do whatever it takes. You will burn yourself to the ground if that’s what it takes to be reborn a Unicorn-founding billionaire phoenix. This is your one shot.

You are setting yourself up for a distressing crash which will threaten your company.

Boundaries are important in life, and in business. Without them in interpersonal relationships other people can take from us more than we ever intend to give. In business, you may be confronted with an opportunity to do something unethical to allow your business to grow. Those moments require you to have personal ethical boundaries which say: “Even if it costs me success, I am unwilling to do that.”

The same is true with regard to your time. A startup can take every moment of your time from you. It’s an easy formula, as a founder there is an infinite list of valuable things you can be doing. You will never know which of those things could lead to some amazing success. You will never do all of them, and the ones you do execute on will never move fast enough. Every moment you aren’t working is sucking from your company some opportunity to succeed (at least within your mind). There are no report cards (at least in the short term), so you will never know if you are doing enough. The founders around you seem to be working harder (they’re probably not), what’s wrong with you?

In response to that, we have our billionaire-phoenix-self, willing to do whatever it takes. That personality will not accept human weakness as a reason we didn’t succeed. Every day taken off is a failure. Every moment not working could make the difference between success and failure. There is a dangerous calculus at play. You can only make your entire self a company if that company can give you back a huge wealth of meaning and purpose. Elon Musk can do it, because his companies are purpose-driven, massively successful, and fast moving. He’s also willing to tolerate a superhuman amount of stress. You probably shouldn’t be willing to do the same. ^[1]

I invite you to, instead, have boundaries. Decide for yourself what is and isn’t worth success. Make a statement of the form:

“I am willing to push myself to grow, and to do a lot to make this company succeed, but I won’t X”.

X could be “sacrifice my relationship with my children,” or “burn my life to the ground,” or “see my parents less ten more times while they’re still around.” What’s important is that you have some boundary, decided in advance, which is more important than the success of your business to you.

That guideline will allow you to build a balanced life. With that stable core you can happily pursue startup success for as long as it interests you, and it likely will interest you for a lot longer than it otherwise would!