What Is More Important: Your Ambition or You?

“It’s when you start taking care of yourself instead of your ambition, that you start stepping up to the next level.”

Most Founders are exhausted, anxious, erratic, and have all of these personal issues and despite those things, they’re able to create awesome companies, 8-9 figure companies. Sometimes it’s even because of those things.

Something people never really talk about is that it’s really tough to be a founder. You’re taking on a lot of stress, a lot of emotional toles, a lot of uncertainty. That’s okay, it’s a good thing that you’re doing that.

A common reason why startups fail is self-esteem. Self-esteem isn’t thinking of yourself as “bad”, it’s when you’re unable to differentiate your startup from yourself.

You are separate from both of those things,  you want to be able to grow and have a growth mentality- your startup needs to be able to change, and the ideas that you put into your startup need to be iterated on.

When people make their startup their identity, it stops them from taking feedback or growing, or changing things, or when something doesn’t work - they feel personally attacked. Everyone goes through that in life. I used to be there too, it comes and goes, but you have to be able to separate who you are from the business that you’re growing.

It’s when you start taking care of yourself instead of your ambition, that you start stepping up to the next level.

We’re all ambitious, that’s why we’re founders. That’s why we set out to solve big problems in the world and it’s why we don’t stop until we solve them. We take on a lot because of our ambition. I’m not saying that ambition is a bad thing, it’s not, but when you take care of your ambition instead of taking care of yourself - who you really are, becomes blurry - it becomes secondary, you become unclear. When who you really are is lost, that’s when burnout and self-sabotage start to take over.

Taking care of yourself develops mental strength, and mental strength is really all you have. It’s your bank account before you have cash and you turn that willpower into cash. People call it positive psychology, or just integrating yourself within society, there are a bunch of different concepts for it, but really it’s just your grit, spirit, your soul - it’s what you really are and remembering that that’s you and not what’s happening to you. It’s your biggest asset in your life.