Can I be a happy founder?

Well, yes, of course, as long as you aren't expecting your startup to make you happy

Last week, I said that a startup is not meant to make you happy. Several people reached out to say that it really resonated with them. I might have struck a chord by sharing something on two topics I explored deeply myself for years: happiness and startup success.

A startup isn't meant to make you happy

There is nothing wrong with building startups, and there is nothing wrong with wanting to be happy. However, we suffer and get our lives into a mess, like I did, when we think our startups should make us happy.

It’s important to understand what’s wrong with this worldview to understand why there are shorter ways to being happy (and, maybe, to startup success).

What is wrong with this attitude?

So, a common attitude I see among founders, and the one I used to have myself, is that running a startup is hard, BUT when it becomes very successful, it will be worth it: I will finally have my peace of mind, freedom to do what I want and will, finally, be able to relax and enjoy life. This is a very wrong attitude.

Let’s break down this thinking to see how it can lead us astray. There are two big and misleading assumptions here:

1. I believe that something external will make me happy

2. I believe that achieving success will lead to peace of mind and contentment

Something external will not make us happy

As counterintuitive as it may sound, external things don’t make us happy because they fundamentally can’t, except for a short while. I say “fundamentally” because absolutely everything in this world constantly changes. If happiness comes from being aligned with how things are and not suffering because something is “not right”, we will never, ever be able to bend the world to our will in such a way that it perfectly aligns with our expectations.

What nearly everyone does, though, is exactly this: trying to bend the world in line with what we think should be. When the world or the expectations inevitably change, we try to bend the world to our will again, thinking that we’ll somehow succeed this time.

Can’t we see that getting what we wanted earlier in life hasn’t led to lasting happiness? We now have new desires instead. What makes us think getting what we want from now on will be any different? Trying to bend the world to our will to be happy is a Sisyphean task: a neverending effort without a resolution.

Another reason that getting what we want fundamentally can’t make you happy is that there’s no “you” as someone separate from the rest of your life: thoughts, feelings, body, habits, consciousness, etc. There is no “you” that can be happy. But your life experience can be a very happy one — as long as you aren’t trying to become happy by getting what you want.

You don’t need to become enlightened like the Buddha did and see through the illusion of having a separate, permanent self, which feels like “you” that you call “I”. If you understand, at least on an intellectual level, that all there is just a constantly changing process, you’ll be able to see a better way to make this process a very happy subjective experience.

From the perspective of seeing life as a process and not as a separate “I” that needs to be happy, the root of whatever dissatisfaction you experience isn’t that you don’t have something but that there’s a desire for it in the first place. And since our desires are limitless, as long as we expect something external to make us happy, we’ll suffer. We can and should live, build and achieve without feeling like we need the results of our work to make us happy.

Photo by Alex Block on Unsplash

You can’t bend the world to your will because it’s constantly changing and because there isn’t a “you” separate from the rest of your life who can be happy in a long-lasting way.

Selling a startup won’t give us a peace of mind

The second fallacy has to do with believing that once we get somewhere, our minds will finally become peaceful. Maybe you’re hoping you won’t be stressed once you sell your startup.

There’s a degree of truth to it. Yes, if have fewer sources of stress in your life, it will be less stressful. However, our mind is the biggest source of stress in our lives (once our basic needs are covered). What I see time and time again in founders who sell their businesses is that their mind finds new sources of worry.

Maybe you don’t have to worry about money anymore, but now you worry about how to optimise your complex tax affairs. Maybe you don’t have to worry about investor sentiment anymore, but now you worry whether your life is really meaningful. Maybe your colleagues aren’t getting under your skin anymore, but your kids are.

The problem here isn’t your circumstances but how your mind works. Once you have the basics covered (food, shelter, healthcare, physical safety), your well-being is primarily determined by how well your mind works, not by what you have. That’s why achieving success without training the mind won’t alter your life experience much.

Don’t expect that making lots of money or achieving some external milestone without making an effort to train your mind will dramatically alter how you experience life.

Can I be a happy founder, then?

So, what is the logical next step here if you’re a founder? Separate your desire to be happy from your intention to build a startup. There is nothing wrong with building a successful company and making a lot of money. Creating intergenerational wealth is far better than not having it. Having a positive impact on the world through your startup is also a great goal. However, don’t expect any of this to make you happy: you’ll be happier this way.

This shift in attitude can help you be a better founder because the more tightly you hold onto your startup as the potential source of your happiness, the more you suffer. Running a startup is hard enough, especially in the very beginning. If you add on top of it an expectation that its success will make you happy in some fundamental way, you will only make yourself more miserable.

I bet that you’ll probably do a better job as a founder if you’re happy than if you’re not: we think more clearly when we’re in a good place, we attract other optimistic and happy people to join our teams, we avoid pointless conflicts — the list could go on and on.

Secondly, do your best to accept the reality as it is if you want to be happy. This doesn’t mean sitting on your sofa and not doing anything. It means not expecting things to be any different whatsoever from what they are and then taking action based on this insight.

There is a misunderstanding that accepting things as they are means living some kind of a passive, resigned life. Far from it. It means not feeling like the universe is somehow supposed to be different right now — and that’s a source of great suffering, I promise you. The universe is exactly as it is; wishing it to be different right now is insanity. The next moment is wide open — take appropriate action if you must — but accept what already is as it is.

Hard work is not optional; feeling unhappy is

My hope for the founder community is that we’ll continue building more startups, making more inventions, creating incredible products, and solving old problems in new ways. The world needs entrepreneurs. Countless problems must be fixed, from climate change to inequality or pollution.

My hope is that we’ll be working hard but without feeling unhappy in the process. Hard work is not optional if we’re founders, but feeling unhappy is. From the outside, it may still look like the same Sisyphean task of making the dent in the ever-changing universe, but if we hold it lightly on the inside, we’ll be able to make progress without feeling like we must sacrifice our well-being.

I know it takes effort and time. It takes effort to identify, examine and change our assumptions about life. It takes effort to train our minds through meditation or other practices. But it’s worth it. We can live our lives feeling fundamentally happy, not as if we’re fleeing a burning building every single day.

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PS I’ll publish my book Startup CEO Succession: a Founder’s Guide to Leadership Transition this summer. It’s all about how to decide whether to quit as a founder CEO and, if so, how best to do it.

If you have an event space in London and are interested in hosting the event (panel discussion with investors and founders on the topic of CEO succession), please drop me a line.