I noticed something about myself yesterday.
I often find myself unhappy with myself.
That usually is a function of wanting to be somewhere else than where I am.
It could be as simple as: I want XYZ tasks to be done, but they are not done yet.
There’s a delta between where I want to be and where I am.
The bigger the delta, the more unhappy I am.
This might not sound like a major thing for some, but in my head, if I don’t get XYZ done, we die as a business.
Realistically speaking, that will always be the case, especially for someone with goals. It’s a blessing and a curse.
Anyway, I realized that when I can be conscious of that ‘unhappiness’, I can also be intentional about changing it.
How do I change it?
I turn on my beast mode.
I move at full force to go from point A (where I am) to point B (where I want to be) and I crush anything that gets in the way.
I become restless. I find myself playing mind tricks on myself like “today I will not eat until I finish this”.
I can be extremely calm, but I would have 0 patience for anything that gets in my way.
I’ve been told that I look upset when I’m focused. I think that’s me using anger as fuel to go from point A to point B. That anger is the feeling I get when I’m unhappy with myself.
I’ve had rough times in my early entrepreneurial journey where my back was against the wall. The boats were burned. There was no way to back out. The only way out of the storm was through it. That taught me that regardless of the difficulty, if you want something badly enough, you can get it done.
The problem is that as the leader of an organization or a tribe, people feed off your energy. When people see you, they might expect you to smile and be energetic with them. I’m more than happy to do this when things are going well.
But when I’m in beast mode, don’t expect me to even smile. I’m in war mode in my head.
My main purpose of writing this is to send it to people when I’m in this mode as a heads up to what they should expect:
- I don’t care about how you feel. I’m optimizing for survival (in my head, I must get to point B). It’s not about you. If it was, you would know, because I would say it directly
- I will be ruthless, but fair. If I’m being unfair, call me out. You can snap me out of it. My judgement can get clouded, but my intention is to survive/win
- I will be transactional. This doesn’t mean I don’t care about you, it just means that I’m focused on something else
Why should you bear with this? You don’t have to. But that’s how I survive/win.
It is who I am. That’s how I played the game. That was my mentality. If you don’t want to play that way, don’t play that way.
Michael Jordan
Thanks for coming to my ted talk.