Chapter 11 Things you can control and things you cannot
Every step of the journey presented unmappable decisions that initially felt too overwhelmingly large to consider. However, in accepting imperfection in our solutions, with a view to continually improve — as we had from the day we launched the company — we made the overwhelming manageable, and the manageable eventually simple.
Work–life balance in the early years
Marc Andreesen has an amazing quote that crystallises the insanity of the entrepreneurial journey. He describes the daily unmapped journey as an ‘emotional rollercoaster'. It really captures where we are in this story up to this moment here. And we haven't even got to the really good bits yet.
The tricky thing is that while I was on the Shoes of Prey journey, particularly early on, balance was nice in theory but didn't mean anything in practice. I'd get so immersed in things I was doing that I would forget to eat, and sleep only four hours a night. I didn't stop to think about anything other than the tasks at hand.
Just prior to starting Shoes of Prey I'd started to experience what I can only describe as a private kind of hell. I'd been through periods of irrationally heavy worries and panic as a child, but it had begun to return in a much more powerful adult form. At the time I couldn't work out what seem like obvious causes in hindsight — a marriage that was unhappy, and struggling to find an identity in a world where I just didn't know what I wanted. (Remember, ...
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