Entrepreneurship and Stress

Starting my first company was easy. I was naïve and asked myself a simple question, "I have always wanted to start a business and if I don't start one now when I don't have a mortgage and kids then what are the chances that I will ever do it?" With that I started the company. Well not really. I also took the Myers Briggs test to check whether I should be an entrepreneur. The test said, and some people would agree, that the last career option I should consider is entrepreneurship. But this is what I wanted to do, so I said the appropriate cursing words to the test and set out to do what I wanted to do.

Anyways, as I was saying I was naïve. I didn't know anything about being an entrepreneur. And I am not the first or last entrepreneur to say that had I known about the difficulties that lay ahead I might not have started on the journey. The most troubling difficulty was anger. I could live with myself losing it at work. I had great partners who forgave my tantrums. But I just could not live with myself losing it at home. My wife forgave me too, but I didn't want to hurt her feelings. I tried a lot of things. I tried communicating my stresses to my wife. I ended up commuting them to her and so I shut up. And that did not help either because whether I said anything or not she always perceived my moods. Then another lady entered my life. My daughter was born. And now I just could not to be angry at home.

Things worked out. I don't know whether they worked out because of me or in spite of me but they worked out. Our company was acquired by a large company and I spent five years in a comparatively stress free environment. Then the entrepreneurial bug struck me again.

Starting my second company proved to be more difficult than the first one. I was afraid that I would start losing it at home and so I delayed my departure from the cocoon for as long as I could. Finally it became clear to me that the only reason that I was not starting my next company was that I was concerned about my mood at home. And the geek in me came up with a solution.

The solution was a spreadsheet that I call my Awareness Spreadsheet. What else do you expect from a programmer who has not programmed in nine years? Here's an extract from the first few days...

Date	Peace Index	Cause	Avg	SD	Yoga minutes	Pranayam minutes
Tuesday, February 01, 2005	10				0	0
Wednesday, February 02, 2005	10				0	0
Thursday, February 03, 2005	6				0	0
Friday, February 04, 2005	8				0	0
Saturday, February 05, 2005	10				0	0
Sunday, February 06, 2005	10				0	0
Monday, February 07, 2005	8				10	5
Tuesday, February 08, 2005	10				10	5
Wednesday, February 09, 2005	10				10	5
Thursday, February 10, 2005	2				10	5
Friday, February 11, 2005	10				10	5
Saturday, February 12, 2005	6				0	0
Sunday, February 13, 2005	10				0	0
Monday, February 14, 2005	10				10	10
Tuesday, February 15, 2005	8				10	10
Wednesday, February 16, 2005	10				10	5
Thursday, February 17, 2005	10				10	5
Friday, February 18, 2005	10				10	5
Saturday, February 19, 2005	10				10	5

The primary parameter that I track is my Peace Index. 10 stands for not getting upset all, 8 reflects getting upset but not expressing it, 6 means getting upset and expressing it; 4 symbolizes expressing it vigorously, and so on. I tracked my Peace Index over the last six months at the large company and calculated its Average and Standard Deviation. And I promised myself that I would beat those numbers by a margin.

Getting to a better Peace Index was my end goal and I wanted to start some activities that would help me reach that goal. I Googled “anger” and found this link (http://www.apa.org/topics/controlanger.htm) from the American Psychological Association. I was struck by the similarity between the kind of actions that it suggested and Yoga. For example, it recommended stretching and deep breathing. The similarities with Yoga asana and Pranayama were striking. And that spurred me to restart my Yoga practice and till date I can report that I do Yoga with 89.9% regularity. If you are like me and love data then you might want to try this just to collect the data and tell your friends I exercise with x% regularity.

Till now, my Peace Index shows that I have been able to manage my emotions fairly well. Will I be able to beat those numbers persistently? I will find out.

Dimdim downloads from sourceforge.net

Typically around 200-300 downloads of the Dimdim web meeting server happen on a daily basis from the sourceforge.net link. Yesterday (21 Jan 2007) that number jumped to 2313 and we were all pretty perplexed here at Dimdim. Today it has risen to even more: 2566 (as of now). We have requested the sourceforge.net folks for some clarification, if possible. So should we all party all night long or should we be worried?