Growth from Within: Hedonic Treadmill
My goal behind launching Recipes for Growth was to provide readers with the tools and ideas surrounding the company-building process. Over the past few years, I had found that there was a missing need - most posts around startups were focused on fundraising milestones, key hires, or growth metrics. I continuously asked myself: but how did the founder actually reach this level of scale? I was often left with more questions than answers.
As my readership has grown, I’ve received feedback that many of the stories have been helpful for entrepreneurs as they chart out their own respective ventures. Learning about how others navigated market opportunities or prioritized product features is not typically covered in detail by the media, and this where readers have found value in Recipes for Growth.
In the same vein, I’ve found another area that is spoken less about: the mental wellbeing of a founder. Building a company is a long, arduous process. How can one stay motivated for 7-10 years as they scale their business? It’s a process – like launching a firm – but my goal is to shed light on certain ideas that could assist founders in their journey. I’m not an expert by any means, but the tools that I plan to speak to have helped me, and I hope you can relate to them too.
To start, my first post around this lens is on the hedonic treadmill: our tendency to return to our baseline level of happiness, regardless of an outcome.
Ceiling Today, Floor Tomorrow
Now, don’t get me wrong. I do think that there are plenty of benefits that come with our proclivity to adapt to a certain state of happiness. That just means that in case I make a terrible investment and lose 75% of my net worth, chances are, I’ll be alright. But I want to think about the dark side of this, too.
Let’s play out a scenario. You’re a founder of a growing SaaS startup. You raise your first institutional check on the back of signing a sizeable client as a long-term partner. You repost the press release in the Twitterverse and revel in the joy of the flood of likes, retweets, and comments that follow. You sleep well that night. Days pass, even though your follower count has gone up, there aren’t as many likes on your newer posts. Where did the love go? That initial spike of happiness has dissipated. Uh oh, your competitor just posted an update of a new annual revenue milestone. You don’t feel that you’re doing enough. You push harder and harder. You feel exhausted…you want more. Your ceiling today is your floor tomorrow.
I’m not discounting the idea of staying gritty, focused, and wanting to win. But what I am suggesting is that by failing to bring perspective and attention to one’s success, you might just end up losing in the long run. Your exhausting ‘race’ to the finish, may not really have a finish at all.
“Slow down you crazy child,
You're so ambitious for a juvenile.” - Billy Joel, ‘Vienna’
Double-Edged Sword
The internet is a wonderful invention. We are living in an era where the world’s information lies at our fingertips. A world where we can connect with people and build relationships, any time. But it’s not necessarily always a good thing.
Delving deeper into this, one of the root causes of unhappiness is our tendency to compare ourselves with one another. The question is: who do we tend to compare ourselves to? It’s shown that we choose a peer group – say, folks that live around you or that you go to school with – and in our minds, use their achievements as a benchmark for what we could or should attain. In the pre-internet era, people would compare their cars and homes to those in their neighborhood, because that’s what they were exposed to the most. However, with the internet, we’ve had a vertical expansion of our peer group. We follow the lives of successful entrepreneurs on social media and compare our success to what they’ve done. We ask ourselves: if an 18-year-old can raise $50MM for her fashion brand, why can’t I? You never feel enough. What cigarettes do to our physical health, comparing ourselves to others does to our mental health.
This is why, in light of optimizing the mental wellbeing of any ambitious person, the internet is a double-edged sword. It connects us and provides us with troves of information. But it gives us the ability to compare and contrast our lives to whomever we choose. Now, I’m not saying that one should monk-it-out and surrender our ambitions by leaving civilized society. I’m suggesting that one should take note that survivorship bias exposes us to the success of many on the internet. Focusing on one’s own journey and accomplishments is the most optimal, mentally fit route to follow.
Stop and Smell the Roses
The peril of the hedonic treadmill is something that I’ve personally faced in several instances. When applying to business school, it was a dream of mine to attend a top-tier program. After getting in, a few months passed, and I pushed myself to seek out the next big goal in my career. I’m grateful for the drive that I have, but there have been days where I’m weary and fatigued from all the accomplishments that I push myself to fulfill. It seems to never end.
What has worked for me is an intentional break during my day, where I mull over what I’m blessed with. Not what I wish to achieve, but things that I’m privileged to have in my life. This shift in mindset - aside from rooting me in the present - helps me take note of the progress I’ve made.
So, as a founder, there are going to be good days and bad. Some days you sign clients and close funding rounds. On others, your daily hustle isn’t recognized and you might reminisce on the stability that comes with a job at a large corporate. But take note, you’re building a firm and innovating for the better! You have convinced a number of smart, ambitious people to help your vision come to fruition.
Stop and smell the roses. It’ll make the ride less bumpy.
Thank you to Nynika Jhaveri, Rahul Sanghi, and Mansi Sharma for sharing your thoughts on the piece.
nice one :)