Expanding a brief quip into a blog post might go against every law of internet nature, which suggests most content is improved by brevity. But something I suggested over the weekend raised enough follow-up that I committed to sharing more. And since my tweets are on a rolling 30-day delete, the below will last longer than the 280 character version.
A handful of replies asked questions or provided feedback. Here are my responses, starting with the skepticism, and ending up with the personal stuff.
@hunterwalk, Stop Pushing HustlePr0n About Stress: My tweet wasn’t anything about how hard you should work, or the cost of effort.
@hunterwalk, You Are Wrong In Some Way: I don’t know what to tell you. It works for me. Your mileage may vary.
@hunterwalk, What Can I Read To Better Understand Stress & Its Effects? I recommend these two books. The Upside of Stress by Kelly McGonigal, and Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky.
@hunterwalk, What Causes You Stress vs What Causes You Frustration? Ok, for me Stress has to do with a deep desire for something to be successful, degree of difficulty in executing, an urgency around the window of opportunity to do so and even skepticism from those around you. Most of the work I’ve opted into historically involves stress.
Frustration – again, for me – has to do with an inability to create change in my situation due to others’ process or incentive roadblocks, having to represent an idea that I disagree with as the product of my team, organizational politics, relying upon colleagues or partners who don’t always share my values.
Ultimately I’m a Work-In-Progress so I want to get better as a person. Maybe some of the things which frustrate me I’ll eventually learn to handle more productively. That would be great! But I also rather minimize or route around them, especially when i believe the downside is higher than the upside.
@hunterwalk, What Happened in 2011 That Helped You Separate These Two? My midlife crisis. After 4+ years, I was removed from running the Product Team at YouTube for a variety of reasons – some of which I probably could have prevented, and others that I couldn’t have (or didn’t want to). It turned out fine but threw me for a bit of a loop, one which took the summer, and much of fall, for me to truly recover from. Here’s a blog post about learning to separate my identity and self-worth from my job, which was part of the tumble.
It wasn’t really until early 2012 when I became a dad that stuff started to fall into place for me from a “go forward” plan. A large portion of that clarity came from (a) deciding I needed to live an authentic life in order to be the type of father I aspired to become and (b) I realized that perhaps I could design more of my time around what gives me energy vs saps it.
@hunterwalk, You Basically Seem to Suggest that Frustration Comes From Lack of Control, But You’re Now in Venture? Yeah, investing in other people’s companies for minority stakes does seem to cede control doesn’t it? But here’s how I live it:
- Satya and I co-designed Homebrew very explicitly to optimize for the things we love doing – spending time with founders (especially post-investment) and each other. We’ve stayed small and focused which means no need to invest in a team that we don’t think we’re the right partner for. And we make decisions by consensus.
- Once we invest (again, a decision we make by consensus), I’ve signed up to help the company become the best version of what it can be. It’s the founders/team’s startup. I don’t sit on the org chart. I care passionately about their outcome – even independent of the economics involved, but obviously because of that too. And we work closely with the founders to support them, even when or after we disagree.
Ok, I think that was most of the questions from Twitter. Thanks for caring and prompting me to think a bit deeper about my answers.