The Alchemist Founder

Being a founder is a great psychological challenge. It’s an incredibly lonely, miserable, and challenging roller coaster of uncertainty, doubt, and risk.

It’s like driving a car with no working headlights or windshield wipers, at 150km per hour, through heavy fog and rain, at night, and with your gasoline tank almost empty. Plus, there are three cars towed to yours entirely dependent on your driving skills to survive: your family and friends in the first, your investors and employees in the second, and your customers and beneficiaries in the third. 

If you want to win, you have to build a winning mindset. 

Winning doesn’t mean having your startup reach the final destination you dreamed of or having it accomplish whatever end goal you planned for. You’ll probably crash, end up with a flat tire, be taken advantage of by hitchhikers along the way, and run out of gas — thousands of times. Statistically, 95% of founders will never make it to the promised land and if they do, it’ll look completely different than what they had in mind. Pegging your victory to a destination you can’t even envision and will probably never reach is a fool’s errand. 

Winning means finding a way to enjoy the experience and to evolve personally, regardless of the final outcome. It’s about learning how to remain calm and find pleasure within the storm. Now, just hoping you’ll develop thick skin as a result of being a founder alone won’t do the trick. Of course, the more you ride the roller coaster the more resilience you build up along the way, but that takes too long and is not enough. 

Plus, that process will happen by default and you’re in the driver seat, remember? You get to make things happen, not just wait for things to happen. That means you have to step out and get in front of it, face the music head on and commit to learning how to remain cool while everything else around you might seem to be falling to pieces. 

Unfortunately, you can’t buy a winning mindset on Amazon. There’s no pre-made, quick-fix, one-size-fits-all formula. What worked for me, might not work for you. Ultimately, you have to build it yourself, for yourself, as a result of yourself. 

I use philosophical inquiry and reflection to build a winning mindset. Ironically, I like philosophy because of its contemplative nature. Since it’s not a science but an exploration, oftentimes it yields more questions than answers. I find that soothing and feel it matches the entrepreneurial ethos perfectly. Just like entrepreneurship, philosophy tends to confuse you more, the deeper in you go. In some weird way, the abstract, elusive, and expansive nature of philosophy has helped me better understand the equally abstract, elusive, and expansive nature of entrepreneurship. 

Philosophical inquiry and reflection is the sacred space of mind, heart, and spirit where I regroup, train, and equip myself with everything I need to keep on going. I call it my “existential gym.” My existential gym is dynamic and in constant evolution. Since I’m the sole owner and paying member, I get to call all the shots, hire any trainer I want, invite any guest, pick and choose any machine, and test all classes. 

I think one of the strongest skills any founder can hope to develop is the ability to build, manage, and evolve their own existential gym. The problem is that most don’t. The grand majority of people are used to living a life of inertia, not awareness. They’re “existential Houdinis,” escape artists trained to run away from, instead of toward to, reflection, introspection, and philosophical inquiry. Addicted to instant gratification and blinded by excessive, distracting stimuli, today’s founders have it harder than ever to disconnect from the noise outside so they can find and tune into their own internal music. That’s exactly why it’s essential now more than ever. 

When it comes to learning how to remain calm from within the entrepreneurial storm, I always turn to the Stoic philosophy. Essentially, Stoic philosophy focuses on the pursuit of two things, virtue and tranquility and it’s a double virtuous cycle: the pursuit of virtue results in the tranquility you need to pursue virtue.

Failing to remain calm by letting stress, fear, uncertainty, frustration, and all the other emotions making up the founder’s daily routine win and take over will rid you of tranquility and by default, of your ability to find virtue. 

Once I understood this, I realized that if I wanted to find tranquility as a founder, I needed to first identify what the virtue of being a founder was. 

For me, the virtue of entrepreneurship lies in the existential reward that comes with it. 

When you start a business everything is new, forcing you to break with pre-established orders and move perpetually outside your comfort zone. You’re constantly learning, changing, maturing, adapting and evolving biologically and chemically to survive. Thanks to its plasticity, your brain expands to make room for all the new neural pathways it must create to register all the new experiences you’re having.

That’s existential creative destruction and the reward is self-discovery. When it comes to obtaining my virtuous reward, being a founder is both the means and the end. That’s why I’m a founder.

What gives me tranquility is knowing that since my virtue comes from the experience of being a founder, rather than the result of it, I will always have virtue and constant, profound, and positive “existential ROI,” regardless of what happens with and to my startup. 

That's why for me, any difficulty, obstacle, or challenge I face as a founder, comes already pre-charged with virtue. I know that by simply experiencing it, I’ve already won. There is a beautifully tranquil freedom that comes with that realization.

It doesn’t matter what I face or will face, I know that ultimately any ride on the entrepreneurial roller coaster will benefit me existentially. Therein lies my winning mindset and my personal founder’s alchemy: the ability to turn any difficulty into existential gold. 

You too can turn yourself into an alchemist founder. Build your existential gym, find what gives your life virtue and tranquility, and build a winning mindset on top of it.