Thread by @patio11

The startup media glamorizes Crushing It and a hard-charging limitless-source-of-morale hustle.

The single biggest off-the-record topic when I talked to founder friends? Our struggles with depression.

Dr. Sherry Walling wrote about stress management: stripe.com/atlas/guides/f…

I appreciate Sherry's perspective on founder stress because she's both lived it and also experienced it at one degree (her husband is also an entrepreneur), and I think the social impact of it is underappreciated.

Life has its ups and downs. The most challenging downs, by far, for me were the ones where I felt like I was missing my mark as a husband and father.

Unfortunately, due to the way stress functions ("Metacognition? Stuff that, THERE'S A BEAR TRYING TO EAT YOU. RUN FROM THE BEAR. RUN!"), I didn't have an accurate mental model for the downs that were, factually, most challenging for my family.

A lot of the writing about startups presupposes that they happen at a life-stage where one has few other commitments and high-quality fallback options available, which does not describe the reality of a lot of my founder friends' lives.

"Eat better. Exercise more. Sleep regularly." are three pieces of advice I ignored for forever, tried out, experienced great results with, and (candidly) still have trouble getting into production on a regular basis. Still, try them, particularly if you haven't yet.

The longer I do this the more convinced I am that virtually everything is a socially contagious disease. You want to pick your peer group very, very carefully; their faults will become your faults. If you surround yourself with entrepreneurs who are crying on the inside...

Sherry makes a strong case for keeping up relationships with non-entrepreneurs, as a grounding mechanism. With the exception of family, I haven't found that to be a hugely useful practice. The inferential gap is really, really large.

I also find that, at least in the place and class I grew up in, the type of challenges entrepreneurship threw at me did not generate the stresses I was "supposed" to have.

There's a script for "I hate my job." My pre-entrepreneurship friends know how to support that.

There is no script in my pre-entrepreneurial peer groups for "I love my job, and am really good at my job, and _also_ I have been unable to sleep at anything like a normal hour for the last two weeks due to job-related stress."

This is one reason I love the Internet, for connecting birds-of-a-feather, and for folks like the @MicroConf crowd, because that's the place in the world where I most keenly feel You Have My Values And I Have Your Problems So Let's Be Friends.

(There is something very deeply ironic about the best event for value-driven family-oriented create-value-through-constant-focused-execution entrepreneurship being in Las Vegas.)

If you've noticed a trend in Atlas-land towards more writing on the softer side of entrepreneurship recently, that's partly an accident of publishing schedule tetris and partly considered, to counterbalance my own tendency to dive into crunchy tactical minutiae.

I geek out quite a bit about SaaS administrative dashboards, revenue recognition, email funnels, sales processes, and Nginx configuration, and all of these are useful things to have in your wheelhouse as an entrepreneur, but the soft skills are still skills.

There's a huge amount of leverage, for almost everything you'll do, to having a keen eye for human behavior (your own and others'). One of the reasons we write about it so much is that I feel it's massively undercovered.

I also think there's a tendency in a lot of writing towards "Oh, human behavior isn't like physics! It's _actually complicated_! You cannot conveniently systemize it and then make better predictions than blind guessing!"

That assumption is almost certainly wrong, in a lot of big ways and little ways. We're trying to cover the ones most relevant to entrepreneurship, in ways which are actionable.

As always, if there's a topic you'd like to see us write more about, please hit us up.