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 generations’ “Sit down and shut up. Man up and take it. We suffer in silence.”
“Take care of your mental health” is a powerful step forward in bringing our inner experience out from under the shadows where we can consider it, work with it, and restore it.
And - as necessary as this step forward is, I’ve found that it isn’t enough for startup founders. It’s not enough for founders to simply “take care of their 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 founders need a framework that captures all of their parts: Your feelings, your beliefs, your passion, and your vision for how the world can change.
And I’ve found that the goal of this phrase - ‘take care of your mental health’ - is always about minimizing downside. It’s only said when you’re essentially bleeding out already.. or just about to.
“Take care of your mental health” 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 psychological functioning. You can grow past your baseline. And to be a successful startup founder, you’ll need to. ‘Taking care of your mental health’ isn’t enough for founders to overcome all of the challenges you’ll experience as you scale your startup. ‘Taking care of your mental health’ is the baseline minimum requirement founders need to simply survive. It’s 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. Your startup can help you do this. It will require it.
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. Founders who scale themselves maximize their psychological upside. Because they believe they can. Their startup shows them that they must. And so they do.
Your startup will challenge you to to scale 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 require you to scale your being as much as your doing. Your insides need to change to match the ambition of your outsides.
Your startup will challenge you to scale your relationships by learning to become an effective cofounder, manager and leader. This requires you to learn skills to effectively and authentically communicate with, 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. This is the ‘company-building’ toolkit - beyond the product-building, technical toolkit - that every later-stage founder develops.
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.
