Intuitively, people know entrepreneurship is not an easy, straightforward, “up and to the right” growth pattern. But spend any amount of time online, and you’re inundated with content on “hustling hard” and “hypergrowth.” How you should be making millions with a company in [insert random industry] after hacking your growth.
It’s exhausting. And I believe it leads to aspiring and current entrepreneurs trapping themselves in a cycle of suck. Much like people comparing their looks and lives to highly curated Instagram and TikTok appearances, entrepreneurs weigh their up and downs against a hustle industry dedicated to making them feel bad for the downs and pay exorbitant fees to recapture the ups. Often, media around entrepreneurship supports that directive, and most of that content is wildly unhelpful to people actually doing the work.
That’s why I was so excited to participate in Allison Nordenbrock Brown’s UNHIRED podcast.
Entrepreneurship In Its Beautiful, Frightening Glory
Allison’s show picks apart the glossy mystique and enchanting hype of “entrepreneurship” as a concept. We get into what she calls the “unsexy reality” — all the stuff happening around the ultra-curated “entrepreneurial experience.”
For instance, the vast majority of startups fail. We’re fed a constant diet of content around “learning from your failures” as a method of improving for next time. But leaning entirely on well-intentioned but generalized advice lets us hand-wave away the deeper challenges and rationale for task/project/company failures. We need to peel back our fragile egos and truly interrogate our failures if we want to learn from them (which is unsexy and painful advice):
These kinds of honest discussions happen but usually only behind closed doors. The regular founder can struggle to find and access honest, personalized feeedback and a community that supports you while being entirely truthful.
That makes a huge difference in startup outcomes.
Entrepreneurs Have To Talk About The Unsexy Stuff
Constant exposure to the beautiful side of entrepreneurship and dismissal of its ugliness is leading founders into an awful mental health trap. The Conversation dug into entrepreneurs’ mental health and cited recent psychiatric research:
Entrepreneurs are twice as likely to report a lifetime history of depression, three times more likely to have bipolar disorder and three times more likely to experience substance abuse and addiction. They are also twice as likely to attempt suicide or be hospitalized in a psychiatric institution.
Entrepreneurs are acutely experiencing the effects of a widening mental health crisis. Many pressures abound, especially amid an era of cost-cutting and “efficiency” with little room for error. Often, founders have few (if any) resources to turn to for help.
We’re seeing more opportunities for discussion emerge. For instance, tech founders local to Indiana can join TechPoint’s Indiana Founders Network with the clear purpose of breaking down the psychological barriers within entrepreneurship. Founders can mingle, chat, and just be without the constant pressures their jobs exert.
Spaces like this are vital to breaking through the fear and trust barriers preventing much of this conversation from taking place. Allison’s UNHIRED podcast is one such space, and I hope to see more emerge in the coming months and years.
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