The Dark Side of Entrepreneurship
/Article originally posted on econic.co.
I’m Colin, Entrepreneur in Residence at Econic. I'm only 31 years young and I can no longer use my hands to navigate my phone, drive a car, or type the words you are reading right now.
This is not due to any medical condition, predisposition, or genetic disability.
It is the result of a dark time in my entrepreneurial journey before I joined Econic. A darkness that has left me without the ability to use my hands.
You may have heard the Elon Musk quote, “Running a start-up is like chewing glass yoand staring into the abyss. After a while, you stop staring, but the glass chewing never ends.”
In many ways, I’m still chewing the glass. Conversely, what I’m experiencing has opened my eyes to the future work possibilities that most people have yet to see.
I imagine you may have some questions so let’s back up.
My story
How did I get here?
As I stared at two wrist braces on both of my hands, this was the predominant question I sat with. Two years earlier I set out to create a business focused on the science of willpower. Now, it seemed I had taken willpower too far.
I have always believed that the human brain is the most marvelous tool in the known universe. There is greatness at the center of every human mind that is just waiting to be unlocked.
How to unlock it…is the question I have devoted my life's work to.
In 2011, I read absolutely everything I could on the science of mind, how we make decisions, how we form habits, how we summon the courage and do what we need to do to achieve great things in life.
I used these lessons to get out of my comfort zone as an introvert, achieve success as an athlete, and embrace the fear and anxiety of entrepreneurship.
The thing that helped me most through this process was understanding the science of willpower.
After almost 4 years of learning and applying the lessons of willpower, I created a website and blog. I wanted to share what I was learning and how I was using willpower to achieve success as an athlete and entrepreneur.
It felt like I had found my purpose:
To help individuals use the tools of science to unlock the greatness within their mind and take control of their future.
To start, the blog was something I was doing on the side while working full-time as a marketing consultant. Eventually, I saved up enough money and had a big enough subscriber base that I thought I could strike out on my own and work on it full-time.
With only three months of cash, I was out of my mind.
I had a subscriber base of about 2000 at that point. I believed that learning the science of willpower, applying that to health and business, and sharing my journey and lessons with an audience would be enough to make a living.
In the end, it was. But it came at a terrible cost.
A cost that would leave me without the ability to use my hands to type the words you are reading now.
Because of this, I’m an early adopter of voice technology. I am beginning to see how using our voices will shape the future of how we work and use computers.
Early Days
In 2015, the world was quieter. There wasn't as much content bombarding people every day as there is now. High-quality blog content was read and appreciated by people. And, if you were willing to produce lots and lots and lots of content, you had a shot at making it.
So, I committed myself to writing 1000 words every single day. I was hoping my blog would find an audience large enough to generate an income I could live on.
The early days started well. I was committed to writing 1000 words per day and I was achieving that goal. I was learning more about the science of willpower every day, applying that to my work, and sharing that with an audience. An audience that was getting exponentially bigger by the day. It was a wonderful feedback loop. Wake left
I was not making any money yet, but my audience was building and I was growing as a writer.
I had a couple of articles go viral like 10 Simple Steps to Strengthen Your Willpower and How to Influence the Subconscious Mind.
Two months in, I felt like I was really hitting my stride. But with only one month of cash left, I had to figure out a way to make money.
I tried everything. Online courses, selling ads, selling referrals, everything.
It wasn't quite enough.
I was living extremely frugally at the time and set myself a budget of $1500 per month. Combining everything together I was making about $900 a month.
So, I decided to go into credit card debt. That's where the problems begin.
I told myself that it was only temporary. After all, my audience was growing, I had a couple of articles that were landing high search results, and I was figuring out my voice as a writer. If I can just keep this up, eventually I will be able to make a living.
So I kept the feedback loop going: learning about the science of willpower, using those lessons to produce more content, and sharing those lessons with my audience.
My audience kept growing, but it seemed like no matter what I tried I just couldn't find a way to monetize the content enough. I was about nine months into trying to make this blog a living and the credit card debt continued to mount.
Now things started getting really stressful. And, I took more extreme measures to try to keep my business and my dream alive.
Kill them with content – not yourself
I scoured the internet trying to learn absolutely everything I could about how to create a successful content business.
Everything I read had a similar message: kill them with content.
So I stepped up my game. I was going to produce as much high-quality content of any kind as I could. I had to. The bills were piling up, and I didn't have a way to pay for them.
Creating more content meant spending more time with my computer and less time sleeping. This is where my knowledge and devotion to the science of willpower might not have been the most healthy…
As part of my research, I learned that when you experience fatigue while running, biking, etc. it is not because your muscles are actually getting to a point where they can't keep going. It is because your brain is sending messages to you to slow down in order to conserve resources and energy.
Remembering this helped me immensely when pushing myself through fatigue on a run or while competing in races. I knew the science and my leg muscles weren't in any danger.
So, I applied this logic to typing on a keyboard. I kept trying to create as much content as possible. This meant pushing well beyond the time a person’s hands can healthfully type.
All of a sudden, my positive Willpowered feedback loop turned negative.
Now it was increasing credit card debt, needing to create as much content as possible to pay it, and using willpower to push my hands through the pain of typing.
Even worse, all of this still wasn't good enough to make a living. So I decided to take a Hail Mary. I would run a Kickstarter campaign and publish my first book.
Kickstarter
The Kickstarter was designed around a book pre-sale that would give me enough runway to write the book, publish it, and hopefully start getting speaking gigs that would allow me to make a living.
I had the idea for the book in mind for a long time. I would share the stories of how twelve of the most successful people of all time used their willpower to achieve that success. Explaining the science of willpower along the way.
The Kickstarter spanned one month and the goal was to raise $12,000 to get the book published. The rules for Kickstarter at the time were that you had to raise all of the money that you needed or you got nothing.
So I set that goal and the clock was ticking.
More time at my keyboard…
Less sleep…
Repeat.
With only 10 days left, I hadn't even hit half of my goal yet.
I thought I was completely doomed. This was it. It was the end of my dream. But I was not going to go down without a fight.
More time on my keyboard…
Even less sleep…
By some miracle, I was able to surpass my goal and raise $13,000 in the end.
Unfortunately, this success came at a terrible cost. The damage done to my hands from that experience needed to be repaired.
Only now I had an entire book to write.
Writing the book
I thought I had finally broken the cycle.
I had $13,000 in hand to publish a book and really make it as a writer. This was a fantastic opportunity and I was not going to waste it.
The Kickstarter wrapped up in November 2015 and I had promised all of my backers that the book would be ready by the end of March 2016. That was a tall order to say the least, but $13,000 would only cover food and rent for so long.
If I was going to get a book written and ready to publish in that amount of time, I needed to completely eliminate any distractions.
So, rather than deal with the Chicago winter, I thought I would kill several birds with one stone by moving to Florida where I would save money on rent and be removed from all distractions.
Shortly after, I moved to Florida and got to work.
By this point my hands were not in terrible shape, but they were in no position to write an entire book in addition to blogging twice a week and trying to keep up with creating online courses.
I knew at the time I needed to do something to repair them, but I put those thoughts to the side until I published this book.
As a published author, I believed I would finally have the credibility and readership that would allow this to become a full-time living.
The dream was right there. So close.
I just needed to push through whatever pain I would experience in the five months and then I could reap the rewards for the rest of my life. At least that's what I told myself.
But, I was exhausted. I tried following absolutely every single lesson about willpower I had written about and learned about over the years.
I ate a strict no sugar diet…
I meditated four times a day…
I went to bed and woke up at the exact same time every single day…
It wasn't enough. I was exhausted. I was running on fumes and falling behind on my deadlines.
Willpower alone wasn't enough anymore…so I turned to Adderall.
A dark cycle
Anyone who has ever taken Adderall before knows the rush of confidence you feel while taking it.
It gives you energy, sharpens your focus, and makes you believe that every single word you are writing is great stuff.
Unfortunately, it comes at a terrible cost. Health aside, it makes you feel awful if you try to get work done without it.
You feel sluggish…
You feel foggy…
You feel completely overwhelmed…
Again, I knew that I needed to stop taking it on a regular basis. But I still had a monumental task ahead of me in writing this book. It needed to be a success. And, it needed to be completed in five months.
This was not the time that I wanted to feel sluggish, foggy, and overwhelmed.
I needed to write. I needed to research. I needed to get a lot of work done on my computer in a short time.
My already negative cycle turned into something darker.
I ignored the pain in my hands, the desire for my body to sleep, I took more Adderall, and kept typing…
Over the next three months, I wrote 140,000 words. My first draft. It was done. Little did I realize that this still wasn't even the worst part of the writing process.
The part that really did me in was editing.
The editing process
One of my favorite lessons on writing comes from William Zinsser’s masterpiece: On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction. In it, Zinsser argues that great writing is not accomplished in the initial writing process, it is all about the editing.
This applies to every piece of writing that is currently out in the world. It applies to every article that has ever been written and it applies to the words you are reading now.
There's a lot of pressure to find the right words, put them in the right order, and ensure they put into the right flow to resonate with the audience.
When publishing a book, that editing pressure increases tenfold. Because once you put something in print, you can't change it.
This idea stressed me out constantly. This was my chance. I had a real opportunity to become a published author and use this book to get sales, credibility, and speaking gigs.
I could not screw it up. Every word had to be perfect. Combined with Adderall, this is a recipe for disaster.
Although Adderall gives you confidence, it also makes you obsess over details. You completely lose sight of the forest and obsess over every bit of bark on the trees.
Worse, I realized that I was unnecessarily obsessing over the details, which made me even less confident in the end product.
This led to even more obsession, even more time at my keyboard, even less sleep, and more need for Adderall.
It felt like a cycle I could not get out of.
Because if I tried to take a day without it I would feel sluggish, foggy, and completely overwhelmed.
So I kept at it. Come hell or high water I was going to finish this book without caring about my health. I could care about my health in April. My deadline was March, and I was going to spend as many hours at my keyboard editing and writing as I could.
By a miracle, the book was published on time. Whether it was actually good is up for anyone who has read the book to judge.
At the same time, the damage to my right hand was now so bad that I had to wear a brace throughout the day.
I didn't have health insurance, I didn't have money to see a doctor, so I turned to Dr. Google to try to come up with some way of healing it.
This wrist brace was the best I could find.
Now, it was so obvious that I needed to finally treat this problem. I finally needed to take a break. But, it was time to promote the book. So once again, I kicked the can down the road.
Moreover, publishing did not result in the outcome I had hoped for. The book was generally well-reviewed on Amazon, Goodreads, and Audible.
However, the problem, as is often the case, is that the audience just wasn't big enough.
I tried desperately to promote the book as much as I could, but no matter what I tried, it seemed like I was destined to only make about $1000 per month.
This, of course, meant more credit card debt was piling up.
When I found myself more than $20,000 in debt at this point, it seemed like it was time to finally give up the dream.
I had given absolutely everything to this and it still wasn't enough. Yet, at the same time, I heard over and over and over again that my own personal heroes of business, athletics, and life simply never quit. They learned, they adapted, and they kept persisting even when it looked like all hope was lost.
As I reflected on everything that I had learned by that point, I wondered if I needed to think bigger. Maybe I need to look at the wider world beyond writing about the science of willpower.
If I really wanted to achieve my purpose by helping individuals use the tools of science to unlock the greatness within their minds and take control of their future, why not work directly with the scientists and researchers themselves?
Despite the abysmal position my health and finances were in at that point, I decided to double down.