- So how do you prepare yourself mentally
to be an entrepreneur?
So what I will say is, maybe borrowing a little bit
from Buddhism or philosophical Hinduism,
but it's really this notion
to try to not get attached to the outcome.
Obviously you're going into entrepreneurship
because you're imagining
that one, you could be your own boss,
you'll be able to apply your creative ideas,
you'll be able to do a service for the world.
But it's good to go into it with a bit of a Zen philosophy
where you're gonna do what's right,
you're gonna do what's in service of the customer
or the user or whomever you are serving.
But you're not going to define yourself
based on how successful you are or you're not.
Because what typically happens in entrepreneurship
is that you start with this optimism
and that's where I started too,
and it's almost delusional or it sometimes can be,
and you might quit your job and then you go into it
and you quickly realize
that the world doesn't immediately
come to recognize the brilliance
of what you might be working on.
And so there will likely be a period
where you'll really question yourself,
you'll be looking at your finances,
you'll be depleting your finances,
and it's all that much worse
if your ego is heavily invested in that as well.
And if you say, "What will people think of me?
"What is going to happen to my career?
"I'm not going to be able to afford
"the lifestyle that I'm used to."
But if you suppress your ego a little bit
and say, "I'm doing this for the good of the world,"
whether it's for-profit, nonprofit, whatever it is,
"I'm doing it in service to others,
"and I'm doing what's right,"
and hopefully you will have a good outcome
but you're not super attached to it,
then it's going to lower the anxiety level.
I heard a quote recently that,
"Anxiety is misplaced imagination."
And I think most entrepreneurs, or aspiring entrepreneurs,
the one thing they have a surplus of is imagination
and that's a great thing,
but sometimes your imagination can get into cycles
of all of the bad things that'll happen
or how people will think of you et cetera, et cetera.
So I would try not to go there.
And if you do that I think you'll just be more resilient
because a lot of entrepreneurial ideas
it's not a matter of whether it's a good idea or not,
it's not a matter of even
whether you're executing well or not,
you do need to execute well,
but sometimes it's a matter of timing,
and the more resilient you can make yourself,
also the more resilient you can make your business.
So making yourself resilient
and we're talking about mental resilience,
you can make yourself financially resilient,
by living below your means, having a lot of savings,
and you can make your business financially resilient
so that it can hit the timing at the right time
or have more time to be able to,
for the market to recognize its value,
if you do it in a very lean way
and if you're always taking new data points
and processing it.
And that's another place
where it's good to suppress your ego
'cause sometimes early on you get so enamored with an idea,
that even if some data points, even if some research,
even if some customers are telling you
that aah, it's not exactly what they want,
you're confirmation bias is almost like,
"Well I'm talking to the wrong people,
"or that data might not be right,"
and maybe that's the case,
but I think the less that you have your ego
super invested in your idea,
that it's your idea,
the more that you'll be willing to pivot,
and the more that you're willing to change.
Famously in the early days of Khan Academy
when I was working on all of the software
I showed it to a friend
and he suggested that I make videos
to supplement the software
and I immediately thought it was a horrible idea,
but it took a little bit of my ego suppression
to realize that just because I didn't think of it
doesn't mean it's a bad idea,
and just because other people had done it
doesn't mean it was a bad idea,
so I said, "Let me try it out,"
and there was a unique take on how I was doing it
to complement the software
that that very nascent Khan Academy was doing
that really helped us get off the ground.
So what I would say is become resilient,
a look that is being aware of your ego,
you don't have to destroy your ego,
but know it's there,
and you have to put it in it's place every now and then.
Always be open to new data,
make yourself financially and mentally resilient
and do the same for your organization
or your nascent organization that you're starting.