What It Means to Scale Yourself
The most common advice people give in reference to my line of work is: “take care of your mental health.” and this is great advice. It speaks to how painful it is to start a startup. And it shows how much society has evolved from previous generation’s ‘sit down and shut up. Man up and take it. Suffer in silence.’ “Take care of your mental health” is a powerful step forward in bringing our inner experience out from under the shadows.
And - as necessary as this framework is, I’d like to build on it. Today I’m going to give you a new framework - I’m previewing the next step forward for you in the conversation about mental health.
Because this phrase - take care of your mental health - assumes that all we are is mental. But we are more than that - and we need a framework that captures all of our parts - our feelings, our beliefs, our passions, and our vision for how the world can change.
And the goal of this phrase - take care of your mental health - is always about minimizing downside. It seems like it’s only said when you’re essentially bleeding out already - or just about to.
It implies that you need to restore some internal capacity whose volume and potential is already known. And known to be limited. But so much more is possible for you than to just… be brought back to baseline. You can grow past your baseline. To be a successful startup founder, you’ll need to. “Taking care of your mental health” isn’t enough for you to overcome all of the challenges you’ll experience along the journey. ‘Taking care of your mental health’ is table stakes.
The framework that captures all of the areas startup founders need to grow in order to achieve their ambition is: Learn to scale yourself. And your startup can help you do this.
When founders scale themselves, they don’t just return to baseline. They exceed it. They learn to grow new arms, new legs, new muscles - they accept the challenge to grow in whatever direction their startup asks them to - without any constraint or limitation on who they’ll become because of it. They maximize their psychological upside. Because they believe they can. Their circumstance tells them they must. And so they do.
Your startup will challenge you to to grow in three dimensions simultaneously:
Your startup will challenge you to scale your psychology by expanding your emotional and cognitive toolkit. This means developing emotional intelligence, self awareness, and skills to understand and manage the intense emotions you’ll feel as you run a startup. It also means developing new cognitive frameworks, belief systems, and ways of thinking to accommodate the new challenges your startup presents.
Your startup will challenge you to scale your relationships by learning to effectively and authentically communicate with, manage, align, and coordinate other people – like your cofounder, employees, c-suite, and board.
Your startup will challenge you to scale process and culture - alongside product growth - that results in a high-performance team working together to achieve your mission, vision, values, and goals.
Founders scale themselves by learning new skills to scale their psychology and their relationships at roughly the same speed that their product and team grow.
