Is This Why You Open Your Laptop with a Sigh?

This week alone, four different people described the same feeling and each one thought they were the only ones who felt that way.

FOUR!

Each one led their business in some way and had responsibilities and long-term goals. I was able to identify the signs of what they were feeling because I too have the same feelings:

It's the feeling that upon opening the laptop,
or checking the email,
or looking at the dashboard,
that a piano is about to drop on you.

I'm calling it Entrepreneurial Dread, because it's different from non-business-related dread. Here's a list of the kinds of dread normals have:

• Public speaking
• Going out for a friend's birthday on a Friday when all you want is couchtime
• Existential dread that life is meaningless and everyone dies alone
• Doing- and folding!- laundry

Entrepreneurial Dread differs because there's a few elements that are unique to being in charge of a business. Here's three examples sourced from my conversations this past week.

"The Market Will Destroy You" Dread

A business could fail because the market changed. For the smaller businesses I tend to work with, they don't have innovation centers or multiple product lines- their sole service line tends to be their one big bet.

If the market shifts, that bet may lose.

If they spread their bet into multiple directions, there's not enough resources to make any one of them win and they will definitely lose.

"You’ve Been Wrong The Whole Time" Dread

Entrepreneurship is a risk. Whether through inaction or action, a business owner has to make decisions and any one of them might be wrong:

• Sit tight or shift directions?
• Hire candidate A or candidate B?
• Invest in a marketing agency or invest in a lead generation company?

The worst part of this dread is that the impact is delayed (could be years to find out you’ve been wrong) and hard to ascribe impact to one single choice…or if you failed simply through bad luck.

"This Can’t Be Fixed" Dread

Especially on small teams, interpersonal relationships have conflict. Whether it’s acknowledged or not, people will disagree and problems will happen.

As a business leader, it’s a rare time when EVERYONE is happy and getting along: it’s much more common to be aware of an interpersonal issue that has yet to be resolved…and that's where the dread comes in.

Conflict might not be solved.

It might always be there.

And for many smaller organizations, the team still has to perform, even if Matt and Marco might kill each other.

For me, this is the toughest one. Coming from an HR and employee engagement background where good vibes are a KPI, it’s hard to accept that solving interpersonal problems doesn’t always trump producing work results. Sometimes getting the proposal out matters more than re-establishing psychological safety on a team.

Making the big-boy call to stop accommodating and start demanding results has so much dread attached to it that I tend to drag my feet about it.

Now that you can see the signs of Entrepreneurial Dread, what can you do to step out from underneath that piano?

1. Talk about it. I promise you that every entrepreneur has some form of Entrepreneurial Dread- ask them and you'll get a fresh perspective that your piano isn't as large as you thought. Smaller piano, less dread.
2. Prepare, don't plan. Don't plan on a market shift or expect Joanna to hate collaborating with John, but be prepared. Conduct quarterly market assessments. Set up success metrics for your decisions. Schedule biweekly 1-1s. Shit's gonna fly- prepare to move the fans around by putting wheels on them.
3. Set better goals. Entrepreneurs always overestimate their ability to attain success and underestimate the problems to get there. You'll find more success by cutting a goal in half, achieving it, and then feeling confident to take on the other half than have dread drag you down, leading you to call it quits halfway through an identical but un-chunked goal.
4. Accept that you will always have something to dread. Occupational hazard of entrepreneurship.

I'm an enabler. Whatever Dread you are currently experiencing (Entrepreneurial or otherwise), take action right now and follow #1 on that list and Talk about it. Add your dread to the LinkedIn thread below 👇

A TL;DR from the CRO

I dread the Golden Hour because I know that means there's only one more walk left in the day.

-Roman Noodles, Chief Ruff Officer

A TL;DR From The Archive: Four Takeaways from Finish

If you want to combat dread, finish important things. There's four takeaways from this book that we've neatly summarized for you to help you finish whatever's hanging over you. Read the four takeaways!​

ROCK TUMBLING UPDATE

While people delight in springtime weather because they can get into their garden, I get excited to hook up my outdoor hose because it makes rock-washing so much easier.

After running rocks through the tumbler for a few weeks, I gotta rinse off all the sludge and put new grit in.

It's a cardinal sin to wash your rocks in your sink- the slurry will turn to concrete in your pipes.

During the winter, I have been known to throw sludgy rock water off my 2nd floor deck.

But when spring comes, I can use my outdoor hose to luxuriously rinse off my little babies.

I took a slo-mo short video of the best part: when the grey sludge gets rinsed off and you discover what a 2-week tumbled rock will look like. In the world of magic, this is the Prestige.

My future as an ASMR Rock Tumbling Influencer starts right here.

Wash off your sludge and see what's underneath,

Dan from Learn to Scale​

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​PS. The springtime birds are chirping for more wine.​