Staying in balance ⚖️
The quality of your life is proportional to the quality of your mind 🧠
If you're new here, I'm André, a tech entrepreneur and founder of LaunchFast, a stack that helps web developers build in a weekend that it would take them 2 months. I post daily updates on my progress from 0€ to 10k€ by the end of 2024.
Staying in balance
This is how people explain the experience of entrepreneurship. With the Dunning-Kruger Effect:
You might be familiar with this picture. We have this confidence bias where we start off very confident we’re able to do something, while imagining what we have to do. We’re in Peak of Mount Stupid.
When we start doing the thing and are faced with reality, we realize it’s much harder than we initially thought. Down we go into the Valley of Despair. This is where most people quite. They look at that Slope of Enlightenment and they feel it’s too much for them. So they submit to their emotions and call it quits.
But for someone like me, who vowed to never give it on his dreams, the size of the mountain does not matter.
What no one told me is that the Slope of Enlightenment isn’t, in fact, a smooth line. This is the real experience of being an entrepreneur:
The past couple of weeks have been extremely exciting. Every single day I have faced those kinds of challenges where I have no idea how to solve a particular problem. Every day has been a rollercoaster of “Oh shit, I have no idea what I’m doing” to “Oh, this actually might work” to “Look at that! I’ve made it!”.
What this means
I’d like to spell out some insights I’ve had during this process.
The first, and perhaps most important is this: even thought I’ve never worked as hard as I have this year, I haven’t felt much stress. In fact, I’ve been energized, excited, and the happiest I have ever been in my life. While pushing myself to my limits.
So stress is not what I thought it was. Stress does not come from pressure. Stress comes from ignoring things which should'nt be ignored.
The other insight is about what is at the limit of my capacity. What kind of person we become at that limit.
For context, I am, generally, fairly disciplined. My friends often say I’m the most disciplined person they know. When I’m not pushing myself to the limit, I do pretty much everything that’s important to me, right: I go to bed early, I sleep well, wake up early, meditate, reflect and journal, workout, work until 18h00 and then spend time with my partner, family and friends, do chores (clean the house, put clothes to wash, go grocery shopping, etc), and go on adventures.
Not pushing myself to my limit is a pretty comfortable and happy place to be.
But I don’t seek mere happiness. I seek to realize - in both senses of the word: to understand and to make real - myself. So pushing myself to my limits and growing from that experience goes from making me happy to making me extremely excited, vibrant, and determined about life, and the role model I want to be for the people around me, specially my future kids.
The insight I’ve had is that at the edge of my capacity, I tend to be less mindful and drop important things. This is normal: if my brain’s capacity is at its peak, not much brain compute is left to think about other things.
So workouts, going to bed early, eating healthy, and spending time with family and friends gets dropped in exchange for hard work late into the night. The consequence of this is that my happiness suffers and I feel more disconnected. A thought that often goes thought my mind is this: “André, if you drop the important stuff, life becomes meaningless, no matter how hard you work. Keep your shit together”. 😂
I’m not yet sure how to solve this, but acknowledging it is a huge first step.
I’ll ask my friends for advice on this ♥️
If you have some, I’d love to hear it too 🙌
Ok, introspection over, let’s go back to sharing what got done 💪
What got done
Here’s what got done today (actually yesterday, I’m sharing this the next morning, because I was too tired to write the night before 🤷♂️😅):
When through 190 out of the 400 websites I could share LaunchFast on
Had a call with devs Benjamin and Sebastian
When through 190 out of the 400 websites I could share LaunchFast on
I’ve found this list of 400 websites I could share LaunchFast on. 90% of these websites are 💩. Still, being the determined guy I am, I will check every single one of them. Hopefully I’ll finish today 🤞
Had a call with devs Benjamin and Sebastian
Benjamin and Sebastian where kind enough to test-drive LaunchFast. They gave me tons of value and tips on how to improve the product and the CLI.
I am now sitting on 9 interviews to draw insights from 💪
What’s next
The first thing I will do today is ask my friends for advice on how to keep myself balanced while pushing myself to the limit. In a very real sense it’s as if I’m a baby that needs training wheels on his tricicle so I don’t fall. I suspect my partner will play a significant role in giving me these guard-rails 🤭 The good news is that I learn very fast 😄 The bad news is that I’ll just keep pushing myself further 🤣 🙈
The second thing is to figure out what to do next with LaunchFast. I don’t know the sequence, but these are the tasks:
Improve the product before further test-drives
Keep helping people succeed on 𝕏
Go through the remaining 210 websites on the list and see which websites make sense to register LaunchFast on
Install analytics - I should have done this a long time ago 🤦♂️
That’s it for today folks. Let’s get it 💪