The Personal Health Cost of Entrepreneurship
The following is an excerpt from Module 1 of our digital course. Learn more about the full course and get started now.
The cost of entrepreneurship on our minds is huge, but the cost on our bodies can be even greater.
In 2009, I’m sitting at my desk, running my business with my co-founder, Ryan, running iContact, and I get a call on my desk phone, which we still had in 2009. I pick it up and it’s a doctor whose office I’d been in recently because I had noticed a little tiny lump on the right side of my neck. I’m 28 years old. After a couple months of it not going away, I thought, you know, hey, it’s just swollen. I probably had a cold or something that is just slowly going away. Eventually I decided to go in and actually ask a doctor about it and make sure it wasn’t anything more serious.
After a month of back and forth, I get it biopsied, and now I’m getting this phone call at work, and the doctor says, “You have stage IV metastatic cancer. That means that the cancer that we found in your neck came from somewhere else in your body. We don’t know where it came from yet, but all we know is that it’s moved from somewhere else. It didn’t start there.”
I was absolutely devastated. I’m 28 years old. I’m running a startup. It’s going really, really well. Revenue is growing. We have customers. We have a big office, 20,000 square feet, hundreds of employees. Revenue continues to roll in. We have investors. And I have cancer.
Liz Hampton is an entrepreneur that I’ve interviewed for a book I’m writing about entrepreneurs and stress. She shared a story with me. At the exact same age, 28 years old, under the pressure of running her business, she ends up in the hospital because she has chest pain and finds out that she’s had a heart attack. A heart attack at 28 years old while running her business.
The Physical Impact of Stress:
The data tells us that feeling anxious and stressed is linked with a 27% higher risk of heart attack. And the risk of any cardiovascular event is elevated by 60% in the first year following a period of high stress. It’s the same effect that smoking five cigarettes a day has on the heart.
During times of stress, our bodies release adrenaline, norepinephrine, and cortisol. Norepinephrine is released directly into the brain. All three are released from our adrenal glands all around the body. Cortisol is a steroid hormone. The long-term negative health effects of too much cortisol include digestive problems, headaches, heart disease, sleep problems, and weight gain.
A study showed that people with the highest levels of anxiety are 33% more likely to suffer a stroke.
We know that entrepreneurs are twice as likely as the general population to suffer from depression. But did you know that twenty percent of people with untreated depression will attempt suicide? Suicide is the second leading cause of death among people aged 25 to 34 years old and the fourth leading cause of death among people aged 35-54 years old. This is a very dangerous problem.
This is the lifestyle we lead as entrepreneurs, and these are the risks that we endure by putting ourselves through the stress of being a founder and being an entrepreneur.
Why do entrepreneurs, the driving force behind our global economy, job growth, and technological innovation suffer so badly while pursuing our dreams as we try to change the world? This stress damages our minds and our bodies. It takes years off our lives. It robs us of happiness every day along the way. It’s a massive cost to pay. Many entrepreneurs who have had the big exits we dream of will tell you that it wasn’t worth it. We have the right equation. We know it takes an entrepreneur and a business to change the world together. Unfortunately, all this time we’ve been solving for the wrong variable.
Entrepreneurship is a long game.
That’s a fact. The data has shown this for years. We know that about 20% of companies survive the first five years in business, and only about 1 in 20 early-stage startups, that’s 5%, will have a large positive outcome. Given this 95% chance that the company I’m working on right now will not be a massive success, I’m doomed if I’m optimizing around the timeframe of this company alone. Instead, I need to optimize on the timeframe of my life as an entrepreneur. The data tells us that the most successful companies are founded by 45-year-old entrepreneurs. You don’t get to become a 45-year-old entrepreneur if you burn out 10 years before that. You’ve got to learn over decades to have the best chance at hitting it out of the park. If you put everything you have into your first company before that, it’s game over. You’re never going to get there.
To reach the best outcomes for ourselves, for our companies, and for our investors, and the entire startup ecosystem, we must optimize at the entrepreneurial level, not at the business level.
This means putting founders first and everything else second. To have more great businesses, we must have more healthy founders. It’s that simple.
After two decades of building companies every step along the way, optimizing for the immediate success of each company, I found myself anxious, depressed, and feeling more alone than ever before. In that same moment, I had more money, freedom, and available time than at any previous point in my life. But I was miserable. While excitedly living my startup dream for 20 years, I hadn’t realized the damage I was doing to myself along the way. I was shocked to discover that when I sold my company the anxiety, depression, and loneliness didn’t go away. In fact, they got worse.
I was so anxious I couldn’t go out to fancy restaurants. Sometimes it was hard to leave my house, even spending time with friends seemed scary. I felt in that moment like I had ruined everything. That moment I described on the carpet, lying on the floor, looking back up at the ceiling fan, watching it spin around, feeling like my chest is going to be crushed, that I just cannot move on, completely overtaken by anxiety. That was one year after I sold my business, not during the time I was running my company. My dreams had been fulfilled, but I felt like I had somehow been tricked, by myself, by others, I didn’t know, but life on the other side of the exit wasn’t what I expected.
Looking back, I realized I’d made three massive oversights along the way:
The first one, I was so caught up in playing the business game that I forgot to play the life game. My hobbies became other ways to work, like attending trade organization conferences and going to networking events. I started playing golf. I hate golf. Other people play golf so I figured I should too. I was terrified my company would collapse, because without it, I would be no one. I had let it become my entire identity. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the same problem still happens when you sell your company. When you are nothing more than the person who created your business and who runs your company and then you sell that company, your entire identity goes with it. Self-worth goes to zero.
To counterbalance the stress and intensity at work, I drank alcohol and chased distractions which created at least as many new problems as they solved. I started more companies. I binged food. I binged television. I threw parties to get attention. I knew I had to balance the intensity of my work life. I just didn’t do it correctly. It turns out I just created more intensity as a counter-balance, and it made it harder to rest and recover. In fact, I almost never rested and recovered.
Finally, I chased excitement, all the while thinking it was happiness. Adrenaline is what drives excitement. It also leads to short-term optimization thinking. It feels good in the moment. In fact, I talked about the chemicals that our mind and our body release in moments of stress and excitement. Our brains actually also release dopamine anytime they release adrenaline, and dopamine is addictive. It’s easy to get stuck chasing excitement for its own sake. Happiness, on the other hand, is joy, contentment, and general wellbeing. Excitement and happiness are two very different things.
These are three reasons why, after I sold my company, I had to start from zero on my path to finding happiness. I told you that the unforgettable panic attack I had was one entire year after selling my business. Of course I’m very aware that I’m one of the lucky ones, one of the 5% of entrepreneurs who’ve had a large financial exit. I had the luxury of time to sit back and figure this out. And it still took me years. So many entrepreneurs are going through this that I just can’t sit idly by without using my experience to make their journey easier. This is why I created the Founders First System; so I could help you avoid the pitfalls that I fell headfirst into.
If you’d like to start tracking and improving your mind as an entrepreneur, consider trying the Founders First app free for seven days. This could be the moment that starts moving your life in a new direction, and you’re joining over 3,000 entrepreneurs who already work together to make our tomorrows a little easier than today. Come join us.
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