If the Shoe Fits: Surviving Your Startup
by Miki SaxonA Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here
Whether you admire Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post, or not, you can’t argue with her success.
But it came at a cost, “…seven years ago I collapsed from exhaustion, burnout and sleep deprivation. I broke my cheekbone on the way down and got four stitches on my right eye.”
That incident lead Huffington to add a third metric to success’ standard two metrics of money and power.
…the third metric, which includes our well-being, our wisdom, our capacity to wonder and bring joy into our lives, and our capacity to give. Without these four pillars, life is really reduced to our to-do list.
Too many in the startup community do treat their lives as a to-do list, from starting a company through marriage and kids, with sub to-do lists for each.
They lose sight of the simple; seeing life as a series of competitive challenges.
Which I find hilarious, since that attitude harks back to the much maligned Boomers, whose mantra was “life is a challenge to be overcome.”
Granted, there are many challenges that indeed need to be added to our to-do list until overcome, but there are many others that, although noticed, may be passed by, with nary a ripple in our well-being.
Destroying yourself for the sake of a vision benefits no one—not your team, nor your investors, nor your family/friends and least of all yourself.
Image credit: HikingArtist