The Psychological Needs of the Extremely Ambitious

For the past decade, our idolatry of startups and innovation has meant the focus has been: What can we disrupt? How fast can we grow? How big can we get? How much can we raise?

Founders are taught to possess enough faith that they can build something very big very fast. This creates a pressure cooker of responsibility that distorts reality to the p... See more

"By far the most difficult skill I learned as CEO was the ability to manage my own psychology... The first rule of the CEO psychological meltdown is don’t talk about the psychological meltdown."

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

Technology is changing one of the most powerful forces in shaping society: ambition. What the most ambitious people choose to do with their lives has a profound impact on society, the economy and culture. It’s changing, fast.First, that digital technology is the most recent in a series of ‘technologies of ambition’ that have enabled ambitious peopl... See more

I know this is controversial talk and antithetical to the success mantras of the metric obsessed, performative, materialistic, linear, Key Performance Indicator driven world we live in, but someone needs to play the role of the annoying child who questions lazily adhered to and potentially harmful conventions, if only to stress-test them. I mean, w... See more

A Founder/CEO must be capable of both extreme optimism and extreme pessimism, carefully balanced against each other, the ratio tuned to the needs of the problems ahead of them.

Being a founder requires constant calibration between arrogance and humility, optimism and pessimism. You need the arrogance to believe that you have something important to say, but the humility to know most people won’t care. You need the optimism to convince yourself and others (employees, investors, customers) to believe in you. But you need pes... See more