Mindset (4/n): Setbacks
Entrepreneurship is full of challenges. In fact, rejection is the norm - the reason why new things haven’t happened is because they were stopped by so many No’s before!
I was speaking with a mentee today, and our conversation reminded me why so many academics don’t go into entrepreneurship, and it’s only in recent years that dedicated programs like NSF I-Corps are being established at universities to encourage smart people to go into entrepreneurship.
If you’re smart, then statistically speaking, you’re smart enough to talk yourself out of risky things like entrepreneurship. And if you don’t, your smart friends will.
That’s not to say you’re an idiot if you’re risk-tolerant enough to go into startups. In fact, many of the most blindingly brilliant people I know can’t imagine doing anything else but startups. There is a happy balance to be struck here.
So, how do smart entrepreneurs overcome the countless rejections and setbacks inherent to startups? This post aims to share strategies I’ve internalized, innovated, and outright invented to improvise, adapt, and overcome.
SWEAT: Move your body. I prefer weight training, because there’s nothing like a 200 pound loaded barbell above your face to snap you out of a mental-emotional spiral and concentrate your attention. But use whatever works for you.
PROCESS: What events happened at an objective level? What emotions are you feeling? Accept that you are experiencing those feelings.
ACCEPT: This one’s simple. But much easier said than done.
BREATHE: Use whatever works best for you. Box 4/4/4/4 breathing. Long inhale to 7, long exhale to 7. Close your eyes. Look at a wall. Into a sunset. Put on binaural beats. Or don’t.
IMMERSE: We are creatures of our environments. It’s like playing the wall in tennis- eventually, the wall wins. Find a different environment and immerse yourself in it.
DISENGAGE: The first rule of holes is that when you’re in one, stop digging. Disengaging from the setback (especially after you’ve accepted it) is the cognitive way of doing that. Continuing to mentally gnaw at the event will only throw good time and energy after bad. You’re not just going to have to recover from the event itself, but the lost time and energy you dedicated toward negatively coping with the event.
REFRAME: What story are you telling yourself about the setback? What does it mean? Or more importantly… what ELSE could it mean? Is there something more useful that it could mean? Play THAT tape forward. This is just another data point, not your destination.
EXTRACT: What useful information could you take forward from that setback? Perhaps you had a hypothesis about how things would go. What were your hypothesis and assumptions? How was the outcome different? What major differences were there? What new information can you take forward? Can you integrate this into a new and improved mental model? If you were told no, can you figure out why? Learn from each No.
BIAS: What negative inferences about the setback can you eliminate due to bias? Perhaps this wasn’t the right person for you to talk to, or they didn’t understand your pitch. Maybe they’re a jerk and had a bad day before speaking with you. Maybe there’s a policy that you have no control over, and you just happened to run into a buzzsaw.
COLLECT: Get busy finding any pieces of evidence that tell you a different story of how you’re succeeding and making real efforts. Often, those pieces of evidence are such a part of our everyday narrative that they become taken for granted, and we lose sight of them. Anything positive is useful.
SOCIALIZE: Remember all the people who your work matters to. Remember that you’re doing this for them.
