Everyone is having an existential crisis
But it’s OK to be excited too
In the last few weeks I’ve flip-flopped between feeling sick with worry to feeling giddy with excitement. I’m not alone. I’ve had dozens of calls with entrepreneurs, investors, family and friends.
Everyone is having an existential crisis
The world as we knew it ended on Tuesday 17th March 2020. Right now we’re living in two worlds — many people are still in ‘old world’ thinking while we slowly enter the ‘new world’. Things will never go back to the old world so we can’t sit back and wait for that to happen.
Restaurateurs are wishing they’d set up a different business — anything but a restaurant. They feel like they could have prevented this pain so are kicking themselves about the decisions they made back when they started up.
Entrepreneurs are wishing they’d stuck with the safe corporate job for just a bit longer. This startup thing hasn’t turned out how they hoped — it was supposed to be exciting, not as stressful as this.
Corporate workers are still getting tasks from their boss and wondering if this is the time to show they’re a great employee or a time to quit. While they do the work their boss asks of them the redundancy axe could fall at any minute.
To state the obvious, the decisions we’ve made have been made. We mustn’t fantasise about what we should have done last year or what we could have done if only we’d known.
Everyone has been through this existential crisis in the past couple of weeks. It’s easy to get stuck in the doldrums — we all want this to be over and we want someone to tell us what to do. Neither of those things are going to happen so why wait?
It’s OK to be excited too
Increasingly I do get excited about the other side of this. The new world will be very different and it could be a lot of fun.
Things that previously took months or years can now take hours. I wonder what have you seen coming (perhaps thinking it was years away) that you could make happen right now?
In the new world we will not go back to our previous lives. Will you throw caution to the wind? What does that mean for you? What will you stop and what will you start?
It’s the ‘Wild West’ again in startup land. The tourists attracted by the trend and really shouldn’t have started a startup in 2017, 18, 19 will leave. Who will be the gritty innovators? Who will stick it out and make something amazing?
There will be winners and losers
A small difference in the decisions we make and in our daily habits will result in a wide gap in outcome over time. What experiments can we try today? Nothing big at first — an experiment could be simply asking some friends a question or holding a discussion. My first experiment was to put 9others online to find out if it would work (it did, and the next is here if you’d like to join us).
In amongst the occasional existential crisis we have to find ways to cope with the pressure, to maintain a balanced mind and to replenish our energy. The life plan we had for the next decade could happen in a week and if we don’t make better decisions then we’re just passengers to the new world.