Startup failure is knowing our friends aren’t asking about our startup because they already know we’ve failed.
It’s knowing we’re the punchline of community gossip, sometimes from fellow Founders who might have a right to joke, but mostly from those who don’t.
It’s about trading that exciting victory we dreamed about for the nightmare that kept us from sleeping at all.
Anxiety can be a Powerful Ally
Anxiety, however, can be a powerful motivator.
It’s often a terrible, awful kind of energy that rots us to the core while accomplishing nothing useful. That’s unless we judo-move that energy into something that powers us toward something positive.
We can stay up all night with our anxiety or we can stay up all night working on our next great idea. Either way, we’re going to be up all night! We can go out publicly with uncomfortable conversations about our last failure or we can talk people’s ears off about our next great idea.
The choice is ours.
Harness that Anxiety — Reload
The best way to cope is to reload. Just start again. Get our focus on something other than failure and work even harder (yes, it’s possible).
That may be surprising because on the way to failure, we’ve likely worked ourselves into panic attacks and clinical sleep depravity. We’re probably worn to nothing.
That’s expected. And yes, it sucks.
Reloading isn’t about working ourselves into more debt or physical deprivation, it’s about redirecting our high-alert energy into something positive. The energy is going to be there — it’s in all of us.
How we channel that energy is what matters.