Secrets to STARTUP SUCCESS

BALANCE PERFORMANCE WITH RECOVERY

Sustained, world-class performance in any field requires what Jim Loehr, renowned performance psychologist and co-founder of the Human Performance Institute, calls oscillation, the balancing of in­tense periods of focus and effort with intermittent periods of recov­ery and development. Over several decades, Dr. Loehr and his partners have closely examined the behavior of peak performers across sports, business, medicine, law enforcement, and other fields.12 Virtuoso musicians, champion tennis players, and high-performing technologists all display a similar back-and-forth pattern of intense effort and recovery. The same is true of the best entrepreneurs. Any talented founder can run hard and bring his or her “A” game for a few weeks or a few months, but leaders who display strong venture lead­ership over the longer term find ways to care for themselves and their loved ones, recharge their batteries, and sharpen their skills and knowledge.

Sustaining your effectiveness as a founder will require punctuat­ing your work with adequate time for recovery, practice, and play. A simple (but often ignored) example is in the area of self-care. Many frazzled entrepreneurs don’t allow themselves enough sleep, exercise, or nutrition. They envision themselves as tough, stoic warriors, whereas, in fact, their health and intellect are fading fast. Personally,

I have yet to find a more reliable way to replenish my strength, mind, and mood than to engage in regular exercise, but each founder will need to find his or her own rhythm and approach for staying sharp and increasing capacity.

If you don’t take time for recovery, chances are good that your mind and body will do it for you. In early 2010, Mark Williams noticed that Modality’s top software developer, a brilliant technologist and the indispensable backbone of the firm’s innovation and development ef­forts, was not performing up to his own historical standards. The be­havior was extremely uncharacteristic, and when Mark directly shared his concerns, he learned that his colleague was on the verge of burning out. “He said he had hit a wall, to the point where he hadn’t wanted to look at another line of code,” Mark said. “We encouraged him to take more personal downtime and he began to work his way back into a groove.” Interestingly, Mark Williams himself, one of the most steadily energetic founders I’ve ever known, someone who could work for months on end with as little as four to five hours of sleep each night, seems to hit his own wall every six months or so, going down for days at a time with a severe intestinal bug or a high-fever strain of the flu.

Another form of this physical and emotional rebellion comes in the form of weak focus, wandering attention, and unclear thinking. It has become fashionable among entrepreneurs to claim to suffer from some version of Adult Attention Deficit Disorder, and no doubt some of us do, but most of us are victims of an unrelenting overload of sen­sory stimulation and emotional strain. Too many founders allow their focus to be diluted and washed away by incessant interruptions and distractions, whether they are by emails, advertisements, or random insignificant tasks.

Two books have recently contributed to the growing body of ev­idence that cultural and technological forces are shrinking our atten­tion spans and diminishing our productivity and effectiveness. In The Myth of Multitasking, author and consultant Dave Crenshaw explains how the modern tendency to wear many hats and juggle tasks leads to huge drains on productivity and efficiency.13 And in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, journalist Nicholas Carr offers the well-formulated thesis that our 24/7 information age is robbing us of nothing less than our ability to think deeply.14

The solution is to prioritize and focus the largest chunks of your time on opportunities and problems that require deep attention and effort. Go for depth over breadth. Devote your best thinking and ac­tion to a few essential challenges each week, or even each month, to avoid being pulled by the tide of a hundred superficial distractions, drifting like a boat without a sail. Determine what initiatives are most essential to propel your venture forward over a given period of time, and then shut everything else out. Turn off the screens and get back to a college-ruled note pad if necessary.