This is a guest post by Christopher Beselin, who is a multi-exit company builder that resides in Vietnam. Christopher was part of the founding team of Lazada (acquired by Alibaba), Intrepid (acquired), Fram (IPO’d) and Endurance Capital Group.
Guest Author: Christopher Beselin
After a bit of a holiday-break, we are back – Happy New Year!
From one of my previous posts, I received back the following question from a reader:
“In your experience, is it possible to collapse the timeline (i.e. 10xing the growth) [of building a company] to the extreme and avoid negative stress? And how do you remain grounded and present enough to avoid tunnel vision when building that kind of momentum?“
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It’s a great and relevant question – hence I decided to expand on that topic in this first post of the new year. High level, my view is that most of the core challenges of building great companies from scratch (even more so at high speed) are internal mental challenges – as opposed to the external challenges people most often state and point to (e.g. competition, business model, physical resources at hand etc.).
When you speed up your building, the frequency of chaos and random issues increases naturally
When you speed up your building, the frequency of chaos and random issues increases naturally. More or less every day someone / something blows up in your inbox or in your face. This in turn triggers a lot of emotional reactions within yourself in response. Usually, this leads to yourself getting carried away by these emotional impulses.
If you allow these constant (usually negative) impulses to lead you, the never-ending emotional roller coaster will inevitably wear you down and lead to a string of rash emotional decision making and mistakes. Ultimately, your mental fatigue will drive you to quit on your company building dream and hence your company will go under.
Lack of resources didn’t kill your company, your mental journey did – albeit yourself and other people might point to other external factors as more tangible reasons for your company’s demise.
Brain functions are reduced to a bare minimum, you become immediately defensive, you want to fight back and your ability to make rational decisions is seriously impoverished.
For myself, when it comes to company building (some other aspects of life can fit into this mental model as well for that matter), I have this internal concept of aiming to manage what I think of as ”emotional adrenaline” to lowest and most even possible level over time, and most importantly, avoiding the damaging spikes.
The emotional adrenaline is more a mental concept than any actual biological finding, but I believe it can help to visualize what your body is experiencing when you frequently receive bad news (which definitely “comes with the territory”, as the Americans might say).
When you are reading an email where for example a key client wants to terminate contract, a key investor is rejecting your financing round or a key employee is resigning, you can directly feel the emotional adrenaline running in your veins. You go into primal fight & flight mode.
Brain functions are reduced to a bare minimum, you become immediately defensive, you want to fight back and your ability to make rational decisions is seriously impoverished. All this happens inside yourself within a split second of receiving the bad news and there is a high likelihood that you decide (almost without thinking) to go on the attack and send an angry, disappointed and highly emotional email back.
The effect is that you, yourself, without thinking or even actively making a decision, just made the situation potentially worse. Alternatively, you might even have misread the initial situation (perhaps that key employee wasn’t beyond salvation of leaving), but with your angry response email, you just sealed her/his fate in the organization – in essence, your emotional reaction just created a company crisis that wasn’t there from the beginning.
This is just one set of classic company builder situations that keeps occurring with ever increasing frequency, wrapped in all imaginable types of storylines, as the speed of the company building accelerates.
So how can we break loops like these and thereby meaningfully reduce poor reactions, rash and emotional decision making and better preserve our relationships with key stakeholders? Basically, we need to build a countering cognitive loop that kicks in right before you go into fight & flight and shoot that aggressive response email.
This allows you to both make more rational daily decisions, but it also allows you to avoid your emotional adrenaline from running into a spike and wearing you down over time.
– What is that “cognitive loop” thingy?
A cognitive loop is basically like a “mental muscle” that you build up over time to counter one of your own behaviors that you see recurring, but deem highly counterproductive. Basically, its a way of re-programming yourself towards a more preferred set of behaviors. It all sounds a bit fancy, but it’s really simple (and therefore actionable) in practice.
First, in order to start to build the mental muscle you identify the situations that trigger the behavior you don’t like. Second, from there you need to establish a very basic new behavior / reaction pattern that you want to trigger within your mind instead. This is the cognitive loop you are building. Bascially you replace the old incumbent loop of “If X happens, I do Y“ with your preferred new loop of “If X happens, I do Z“ in your mind.
Importantly, the new cognitive loop needs to be super simple so that you can mentally trigger it in the split second your emotional adrenaline would have started running. Just like any muscle, it will take many reps to build, but in return becomes very valuable in your daily life once it’s there.
As a concrete example, for the situations we touched upon above (e.g. a termination email from a key client, key employee etc.), many years ago I started to build the very basic cognitive loop in my head “the first reaction, is no reaction“. It’s short (you will remember it), it’s simple (it’s clear which is the desired behavior and it’s easy to act upon – just do nothing!) and it achieves the key objective of keeping your emotional adrenaline as low as possible, with all the associated compounding benefits for your decision making and your perseverance over time.
…it achieves the key objective of keeping your emotional adrenaline as low as possible, with all the associated compounding benefits for your decision making and your perseverance over time.
In practice, this very basic cognitive loop (if you learn to trigger it consciously, or even better subconsciously, every time you realize the emotional adrenaline could start spiking) will allow you to a) not go into fight & flight when you as a company builder is the recipient of bad news daily, b) stop, think and respond rationally instead of emotionally (make better decisions, but also avoid making the situations worse), and c) manage your emotional adrenaline to an even and low level so that you are not worn down to quitting your mission over time.
On the flipside, you lose almost nothing by not reacting immediately to negative company building news – stop, avoid reaction, wait for a few minutes, feel the emotional adrenaline go down (or even maybe never start running high as learn to trigger the cognitive loop earlier and earlier in the reaction pattern) – thereafter, make a conscious and thought-through decision on how to respond (or not respond at all).
Only in a handful of situations would you be losing out by avoiding a split second counter-reaction to bad news – e.g. “the office is on fire!”, “there is a tanker crashing into the building!“, “customer service is under attack by bears!“, etc. Funnily enough, it’s for these types of primal threats that your brain was wired the way it is. We just need to help re-calibrate it a bit for 10,000 years of human evolution 😉
“the first reaction, is no reaction“
Finally, the above cognitive loop is just one basic example of how we can actively build coping mechanisms to manage the emotional / psychological journey of building companies from scratch. There are many more and the principle of building up countering cognitive loops to remove undesired and recurring behaviors can be applied across any number of topics/behaviors within your company building pursuit.
The key is to keep them simple, easy-to-act-upon and effective + making sure you iterate on the loop over and over again to make it stick and be possible to trigger subconsciously.
Let’s build it!
Chris
