Entrepreneurs are always stressed that they’re not making enough progress, but it’s because they’re measuring progress the wrong way.
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One of the strangest things about successful entrepreneurs is how ignorant they are of their own success. To be clear, I don’t mean the few entrepreneurs who’ve built billion dollar companies, cashed out, and are now relaxing on private islands somewhere. I’m referring to the much more common scenario of entrepreneurs who’ve achieved what are, objectively, admirable levels of success with their companies but are still grinding away on a near-daily basis trying to reach the next big milestone for customers, revenues, investments, etc. These active entrepreneurs are often some of the most frustrated and pessimistic people in the world. Talk to them about their companies on any given day and you’ll come away feeling like their businesses are on the verge of collapse.
To be fair, this type of negativity from founders is understandable. Any founder deep in the trenches of building companies is going to struggle gauging progress, particularly in relation to other entrepreneurs. Sure, they have things like revenues and valuations, but those aren’t perfect measures of success because they’re too industry-specific. For example, a pharmaceutical startup has very different revenue and valuation trajectories than a consumer packaged goods startup. Instead, founders are stuck battling the neverending, day-to-day challenges of existing without any good way of comparing their results to the results of others, and it causes them to feel like they’re in the middle of an unwinnable war.
Sure, outsiders can recognize and appreciate that these struggling founders are making great progress, but those outsiders aren’t living with the day-to-day feelings of inadequacy and failure. For the founders themselves, the difficulty of not being able to recognize their own success is one of the biggest causes of stress in the entrepreneurial community. If we want to find ways of helping founders decrease stress levels, then founders need a better way to judge their own progress.