The Stoic Founder

The pursuit of virtue and tranquility amidst the entrepreneurial storm

The stoic founder wins.

Starting a business is incredibly lonely, miserable, and challenging. It's a roller coaster of uncertainty and risk. If you don't learn how to remain calm from within the storm, you're done. 

What I’ve learned is that just hoping you’ll develop thick skin as as result of being a founder alone, doesn’t do the trick. The more you ride the rollercoaster the more resilience you build up along the way, but that’s not enough and it takes too long. You have to step out and get in front of it, face the music head on and commit to learning how to remain cool while everything else around you might seem to be falling to pieces. 

My method has always been philosophical inquiry and reflection. That is the sacred space of mind, heart, and spirit where I regroup, train, and equip myself with everything I need to keep on going. My philosophical gym is dynamic and in constant evolution. I get to invite whomever I want, pick and choose my suppliers, test out all options, and enjoy the work out. I think one of the strongest skills any founder can hope to develop is the ability to create, manage, and evolve their own winning philosophical gym. 

For this particular endeavor, for training myself to remain calm from within the entrepreneurial storm, I’ve turned the Stoics. 

Essentially, Stoic philosophy focuses on the pursuit of two things, virtue and tranquility. The pursuit is experienced as a double virtuous circle: the pursuit of virtue results in the tranquility you need to pursue virtue.

Therefore, letting stress, fear, uncertainty, frustration, and all the other emotions that are part of the founder’s daily routine win and take over, will rid you of tranquility and by default, of your ability to find virtue. 

Once I understood this, I realized that if I wanted to find tranquility as a founder, I needed to first identify what the virtue of being a founder was. 

For me, the virtue of entrepreneurship lies in the existential reward. What gives me tranquility is knowing that since my virtue comes from the experience of being a founder, rather than the result of it, I’ll walls have virtue and constant, profound, and positive existential ROI, regardless of what happens with and to my startup. 

That's why for me, any difficulty, obstacle, failure and any other hard thing I face as a founder, comes already pre-charged with virtue. I know, that by simply experiencing it, I’ve already won. 

There is a beautifully tranquil freedom that comes with that realization. It doesn’t matter what I face or will face, I know that ultimately any loop of the entrepreneurial rollercoaster I ride will benefit me existentially. That’s my founder alchemy - the ability to turn any difficulty into existential gold. 

You too can turn yourself into an alchemist and bulletproof founder. You just need to find your virtue and tranquility.