Great guest post by Noah Kagan of AppSumo fame (not to mention Mint and Facebook and…) on the always-insightful Smart Bear blog:
Then it hits me around 2pm, I feel like shit. I can barely push myself to work, I have zero interest in doing anything AppSumo related, my teammates are chatting in our group chat and I want to be doing anything but this.
One cliche you hear about startups is that it’s like a roller coaster.
Bullshit. With a roller coaster, even the downs are fun. In fact, downs are the best part!.
Downs are no fun in a startup. Occasionally are the fount of creative thinking or even lucky breaks (“just when we thought there was nothing we could do and would have to shut down the business, my phone rang…”). But for the most part these are just stories we tell ourselves after the fact to give our suffering a narrative arc.
98% of the time, downs just plain suck and nothing good comes out of them. The only way you get out of them is distracting yourself for a while until you go from incredibly depressed to merely depressed.
In the last few years I’ve noticed more and more posts like Noah’s, and I’m glad to see them. Here are a few others that have resonated with me: