Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind

I had much to be grateful for, and yet my entire focus was on what was going wrong. My mood didn’t fully fit the scatterplot of life. But whose mood does? That night, we went to a karaoke beach bar. The guy who ran the place was all smiles: making drinks, playing songs, singing along. I marveled at his positivity. I wondered why I couldn’t be like

I’d spent a year in Dodgeville, Wisconsin—working

It occurred to me then that the best way to build influence with someone is to accept their influence to begin with.

WHEN YOU’RE FIGHTING A HOLE in your own soul, the first step is to invent a real-world enemy to stand in as a proxy. The second step is to disguise that enemy as your friend.

The guideshops, our next-generation retail store concept, were a classic story of innovation: notice something in the corner that’s working and that is antithetical to your worldview, open your mind to it, give it some water and nutrients, and watch it flower into a centerpiece of your strategy.

“Think in terms of an electric light socket. Plug a lamp into it and you get light; stick your finger into it and you’re dead. Electricity doesn’t choose your fate, you do.”

When we say someone “is bipolar” rather than “has bipolar disorder,” that’s like saying that someone “is cancer” rather than “has cancer.” The hardest part is that that’s what we hear when we are diagnosed. I am bipolar. Or when others whisper: He is bipolar. Which is why it’s easier to not say it at all, and deny the whole thing.

intervention for me. They both knew something I didn’t. I needed to create a geographical boundary between

examination: they both delivered better service as apparel