Founders are taught to possess enough faith to will whatever they’re working on into existence but are rarely reminded to worship anything but themself. This creates a pressure cooker of responsibility that distorts reality to the point that they often find it hard not to confuse themselves for God — and we all know how that ends.

Molly Mielke • morals

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Any ambitious person knows that feeling—that you must do great things, that you must get your way, and that if you don’t that you’re a worthless failure and the world is conspiring against you. There is so much pressure that eventually we all break under it or are broken by it.

Ryan Holiday • Ego is the Enemy: The Fight to Master Our Greatest Opponent

Fighting the inner urge to control is probably the hardest challenge for founders and CEOs in self-managing organizations. Over and over again, they must remember to trust.

Frederic Laloux • Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

For a long time, I harbored the belief that there was a yearning at the heart of entrepreneurial ambition, a tender dimension that no one wanted to acknowledge. Some spiritual aspect beneath the in-office yoga classes and meditation apps and selective Stoicism and circular thought-leading. How else to explain the rituals and congregations, the conf

Anna Wiener • Uncanny Valley: A Memoir

There are two types of founders.

Those who do lots of research, validate ideas, test many prototypes, and iteratively get to a product. This is a more technical and user-focused approach.

The other is where the product vision emerges fully-formed in the founder’s eye before it is brought to existence. Here, the founder zeroes in on their self express... See more

sari azout • Things I'm Thinking About

We all know “startups are hard,” but I think we tend to imagine that this difficulty is bounded, contained, modelable, a bit like running a marathon: yes, legs and lungs hurt, but that’s normal and appropriate, and we know the route, the distance, and that there’s a finish line. This is a kind of difficulty we can contend with without losing oursel... See more

Chris Best • Principles and pragmatism

According to Buechler, many startup founders struggle with “emotional management,” which includes the simple act of recognizing when they’re feeling stressed out.

Arianna O'Dell • fastcompany.com

How can I maintain my creativity, optimism, intellectual vitality, and sense of agency in the face of the stress that comes from building a company and the endless forces luring towards conformity?

sari azout • My Favorite Questions

Being a founder is amazing because you get to build what you want to see in the world and you’re the “god-king/queen” at your company, but the odds are wildly against founders making a huge return, while the odds are in favor of a lifelong angel or venture capitalist getting rich.