Let’s talk about focus, and specifically, emergency focus. There are these moments in our lives when our thinking pattern, our thought pattern, and our ideas sort of get pulled in a direction that maybe can be a little obsessive or maybe can’t serve us in the ways that it might if it was a little more calm and had a lower intensity with it.

Finally, we’re going to look at the happiness scale. This is, in many ways, an outcome of the other factors, but for me I also found it’s a leading indicator as well. Happiness perpetuates happiness. When our mind observes us doing the things that make us happy and protecting ourselves by making sure we always have time for them, it actually starts to reward us with more happiness. We feel confident about the fact that we know we can serve what we need in the future in order to make ourselves happy as well.

The next scale is the mood scale. On the mood scale, you select two different numbers as well. The first number is the high-mania number. It’s the highest level of mania you experienced during the measurement period. Your high-mania number is, numerically, the low number on the left. Think about the highest level of excitement you got to in the period we’re talking about. Remember that going in the mania direction doesn’t actually always feel bad. Sometimes actually it feels really, really good, and that’s why it can be dangerous because we can get stuck there, or we can find ourselves craving going back there again because of the excitement that comes with it.

The energy scale goes from 1 to 10. On the 10 side you are full of energy, and on the empty side at 1 you have barely enough energy to get out of bed. We typically think about energy as what moves our bodies, but it also runs our brains. Your job as founder of your company doesn’t likely require you to move heavy items around or doesn’t have much to do with how much pain you can endure or how physically strong you are, but your job probably does require immense brain power. Energy is needed for intelligence, patience, focus, and even intuition.

We use scorecards full of business metrics to track the health and performance of our companies. In the Founders First System, we use the same structure to track and improve our personal health metrics.

Market research is a part of the product development process during which you gather information about the consumers’ needs and preferences. It’s a key component of your marketing strategy that can help you maintain your competitive advantage. If your market research is thorough, you will establish a target market for your product. You can conduct market research in-house or you can hire a third party that specializes in the process.

There are a lot of tips and tricks about how to pitch to investors. Many articles will tell you to be concise, focus on storytelling, and include a bunch of technical information, like product-market fit, target market research, your business plan, and much more. Others will tell you exactly what to avoid, like choosing not to present a demo or failing to send a follow up thank you email. With all of this advice to follow, the idea of pitching to investors can become quite daunting.

Affiliate marketing is a strategy in which a company partners with affiliates to help promote their products or services by offering commission-based incentives in return for every lead. Affiliates are also called publishers and they can either be an individual or a company that promotes the product or service to their network. If someone from their network purchases the product, then the affiliate will get a portion of that revenue. However, there are a lot of affiliate programs out there that promise the world, but not all will be the right fit for your company or product.

You don’t have to be an everyday investor or work for a financial institution to invest in startups. With the emergence of crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Patreon, the general population now has a lot more access and opportunity to start investing in startups themselves.

The entrepreneurial industry is in crisis and people are afraid to talk about it. If you do a cursory search, you’ll likely find a handful of articles about increasing anxiety and depression rates among entrepreneurs, but it’s certainly not common knowledge nor is it a part of everyday conversation.

One of the problems with being an entrepreneur is this requirement to be creative, and to creatively solve really complex problems on a regular basis. Most of our companies are small and growing - they’re innovative, they’re in new sectors, they’re cutting edge - and our ability to be creative and to see the future and to think of innovative new ways to do things in the moment is often very critical to our success.

We have a hack of the mind and the body, our physiological systems, that some researchers are saying is doing something really interesting that they can’t quite explain. The tool we’ll be discussing is called Squat Breath - available in the Founders First app. This is an elevated breath work practice where we’re breathing really quickly while at the same time moving the biggest muscles in our body - our legs - as we move our entire bodies up and down timed with that accelerated breath rate.

Make an effort to watch how your body responds to the mental olympics that we tend to put it through every day - working on our laptops, working on our devices, as we Zoom into the world to connect and do the business that we need to do. We challenge you to find those moments of tension and watch to see what kind of activities cause us to take on a little bit of extra tension in the body.

Let’s talk about the concept of focus. Not just focus like we might traditionally think about it, maybe from the standpoint of prioritization or having a to-do list and being focused on the things that are on that to-do list.

We’re living in a time when we’re spending so much time on our computers, dialed into these Zoom calls, connecting with people more digitally than we ever have before, which means not connecting in person as much as we have in the past.

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.

I’d like to take a moment to share with you the traits of successful entrepreneurs. Everyone loves this part. Let’s talk about what it takes to be successful. These are the 11 traits of successful entrepreneurs. A big study went out and measured the personality traits and behaviors of entrepreneurs that were the most successful, and they found that these were the traits that they had that made them different from everybody else.

What are you enduring right now? Where are you living currently on this scale? No stress? Life is an endless vacation with no worries? Or the other end; extreme stress, not sure you can go any further. How much stress do you feel you’re enduring currently as you follow your passions and chase your dreams toward that ultimate vision and passion that you want to fulfill?

It’s 2013 and I’m lying on the floor of my home office, looking up at the ceiling, and my entire body is overtaken with stress. I literally can’t stand up. I’m in the middle of a massive panic attack, and it’s scary. I’m lying on my back, and I’m looking up at a ceiling fan just spinning around, what feels like in slow motion, above my head. I want to stand up, but I can’t. It feels like a giant muscle spasm has frozen my entire back and up around the side of my neck. Honestly, it was like a car drove over me and stopped with the front tire on the top of my chest, ready to just crush me. I’m frozen in place with my heart rate going faster and faster. It feels like I’m in a complete sprint, and I’m just lying still on the floor.

Finding a co-founder is kind of like finding The One - you’re looking for someone that balances out your weaknesses and challenges you to improve your strengths. Someone aligned with your goals and passionate about your mission. But similar to finding a life partner, even if you find a co-founder that meets all of that criteria, it means nothing if you both don’t have the same vision of the future. If your idea of the future of your business doesn’t match up, then perhaps your goals and passions aren’t truly aligned after all.