Growth from Within: Catastrophizing
"Oh, baby, baby, it’s a wild world" - Cat Stevens
Have you ever felt your mind racing to the worst possible outcome when faced with uncertainty? That pit in your stomach that follows? If you answered ‘yes’, well… you’re normal. I’m not certain if it’s our genetic hardwiring to jump to the worst-case scenario (remember, that back in the day, we had to remain alert to survive those bear attacks in the wild), or our mental filtering that makes it ‘easy’ to think in extremes. Catastrophizing – jumping to negative outcomes - as we’ll call it, simply dissipates our mental energy and is a catalyst for anxiety.
What prompted me to start thinking about this was my own experience in catastrophizing during my job interview process. The second I would click out of the Zoom screen, I’d immediately run through the many things I could have done or said to make a better impression. I’d catch myself listing everything that didn’t go according to plan. It ended up affecting my ability to simply bring my best self to an interview. And as I’ve found with many mental roadblocks, if I am feeling this way, I’m probably not alone.
As highlighted in my previous posts, one thing is clear: building a company is a laborious journey that is packed with moments of uncertainty. With this uncertainty, it is but natural to fall into the trap of catastrophizing. In this piece, my goal is to highlight where founders tend to fall into this trap and present a set of frameworks that could be used to re-orient this state of paralysis into a more cheery panorama.
Floats Your Boat
In a world where launching a company costs less than a domestic round-trip flight, founders are always watching their backs. There’s this fear that somebody is going to chip away at their company’s market share. We’ve been taught to believe that only the paranoid survive. This realm of thinking isn’t entirely a waste – being ‘on edge’ produces exceptional outcomes for companies, where innovating is the norm. But, as you’d imagine, this is burdensome on teams.
Let’s walk through an example. When a founder launches their company, the main initial goal is to get to product-market fit – that is, a place where you know there is a need for your product. There is increasing demand and a ‘pull’ from the market. Once you reach this milestone, you are able to scale knowing that every investment you make into your product leads to an eventual sale. Once a company hits this milestone, we see funding galore; a media frenzy surrounds the formerly embryonic enterprise, and stories highlighting the potential growth of the company make their way to the Twitterverse. For founders still looking to achieve product-market fit, however, this appears frustrating. Fear and feelings of disillusionment rush through their heads – how can my competitor raise from that fund? Why haven’t I been able to build a product that consumers love? What skills am I lacking that are preventing me from succeeding? These questions of inadequacy get etched into the minds of an entrepreneur.
What we have here is a founder catastrophizing. Not because of how his/her own company has performed, but how a competitor has. The truth is, finding product-market fit is an artistic process – you need to be creative and open to experimentation. It takes time and trying many different product features before something clicks. So, worrying about how another company has achieved a certain milestone shouldn’t dissuade founders from achieving their own goals. Instead of going down the rabbit hole of negative thinking, it’s best to take a step back, acknowledge the progress one has made, and take a rational approach on how to move forward.
A Tiny Spec
I came across this tweet a few weeks ago and it resonated with me. What it’s really getting at is that in life we tend to make things about ourselves. And naturally, right? We are, after all, living our single, specific human experience. But once we step outside of the green screen that is our Truman Show, we must acknowledge there are billions of people experiencing their own versions of life, concurrently. We are just tiny specs in the vast expanse of the universe.
How is this linked to catastrophizing, you ask? By simply diminishing our sense of importance in the eyes of others, we start to place less emphasis on the fact that others are out to get us. Jumping to negative conclusions is a sure-fire way to waste mental energy.
Moving On and Getting Over
Okay, okay… now that we have a good idea around the risks of catastrophizing, let’s dig in deeper on how to prevent it from taking over our headspace. The first mental ‘shortcut’ that leads to negative thinking is overgeneralizing; or, put simply, taking an isolated event, and treating it as a sign of what’s to come. The product demo that you pitched to a large client didn’t lead to a sale? That must mean that the demo is poor or that the pitch is ineffective. Wrong! That is outcome bias and there are too many variables at play to attribute it to one cause. Referencing Nassim Taleb’s Law of Large Numbers - the average is always more stable and provides more insight into an outcome. Think about it: casinos never shut down after a person wins in Roulette; they know that in the long run, the odds are in their favor. Play the long game when measuring the quality of an outcome.
Second, and this is something we’re all guilty of, is discounting positives. In many ways, this is linked to the hedonic treadmill, where because of the laser focus on the outcome, we amplify the things that don’t go our way, without adequately giving credit to those that do. Remember – all of us are on our own journey. If your friend from college has scaled his product to tap into a user base of a million users but you are stuck at the early stages, don’t fret. Baby steps, they say, and that’s the approach one should take here too. Focus on the little, daily improvements, and the beauty of compounding will lead to wonders.
I’ll end on a note that helps me whenever I find myself kneeling at the altar of social comparison. It’s an obvious yet overlooked thought by Naval Ravikant:
“You can’t cherry-pick the things you envy so much about the other person. You would have to take a 180-degree swap with that person. You would have to take her age, her family history, her struggles, her failures, her medical conditions, her pains, her parents, her friends, everything. And lose everything you have built and leave everyone you love behind. And unless you are totally comfortable with that swap, you shouldn’t be envious.”
Thank you to Rahul Sanghi for reading and editing my drafts.
Very perceptive ... Well done ...