Handling Stress

Everyone has problems and everyone has stress. But I've noticed that the stress I feel running a business is different than the stress I felt as an employee or as a student. In both of those cases it came in waves - I had big project deadlines or big presentations or final exams, but once those were over there was some time to breathe. As an entrepreneur I feel like the stress never ends.

This week has been one of the most stressful weeks of my life. I'll spare you the details because they're really irrelevant for the purpose of this post, but lets just say it's been one of those weeks you'll look back on and think about how many cool things you accomplished, yet sucks while you are going through it.

The stresses never end. When you launch a new business, you stress about business structure and taxes and getting your site ready to launch. Once you go live, you realize you've worked yourself to the brink of insanity and you don't have a customer and you have no revenue. Once you start rolling, you worry about managing your growth - can you keep all of your clients happy? do you need to hire (more) employees? is your tech infrastructure going to crumble?

So what do you do? I think the first step is to realize that you will always have a certain level of stress. This isn't college where you have four tests in a week and then a month to breathe and relax. It's hard to realize that your business will always be stressful, but it's true - ask Bill Gates if he's ever had a stress free period at MicroSoft. Either he's running around from company to company trying to pitch his OS, or he's worrying about Google taking over the desktop with web applications.

The amazing thing is, once you recognize the stress you have two choices - let it crumble you or learn to live with it. If you are the type of person who puts your entire life on hold to get every little bit of work done, I think it will crumble you. You neglect your family, your health, and the other things that are important to you and eventually it catches up. I'm at the point where I'm learning to live with it. It's NOT the end of the world I tell a client that it will take 4 weeks to get something that I think I can do in 2 or 3. I want to make sure that I can still have a social life, work out, play video games (yes, that's important to me), and spend time with family. In the end I'll be a happier person which will ultimately result in a better entrepreneur (no one likes a bitter, stressed out business owner).

Worrying about things will get me nowhere. I try to look at all of the great things that are happening and really enjoy the journey. I don't want to be one of those guys who ends up being 80 years old and still running around worrying about their business. It can go on forever, and at some point you'll realize you pissed your life away.