Stress comes from within

Stress wasn't a sign I was failing. It was a sign my inner compass was out of date.

It’s Sunday night and the knot is already there. An email went unanswered for three hours today and I read the silence as a verdict. I keep bracing for bad news that hasn’t arrived, and probably won’t. The code wasn’t working as well as I hoped and needed debugging.

A few weeks ago I decided to start a company. I expected the long hours but I didn’t expect this.

I’ll say more about what we’re building soon. For now, know that it lives at the intersection of two things I’ve spent my life circling: AI, and making good decisions and predictions.

I want to be honest about why I am doing this. Not ambition, or not only that. It was the plain arithmetic of one life: a finite number of years where I’d still have the energy and the freedom to build something of my own. I found so much curiosity and joy in what I’d discovered that not pursuing it felt like the real risk. The cost of trying was failure. The cost of not trying was a regret I believe I would carry for a long time, or not, we’ll see.

So why the knot?

The model in your head

As it turns out, the brain is a prediction machine. It builds a model of the world and checks it against what actually happens, thousands of times a day. When the model matches reality, you feel calm and capable, even when you’re busy. That calm doesn’t come from having nothing to do. It comes from knowing what to expect.

For eighteen years in Big Tech I could read my world. I knew what a good week felt like, who to call when something broke, how a launch was supposed to go. I knew my way around. In the past year, I had cleared most of my schedule; most days were consistently around a few themes: family, health, tinkering, and rest.

A startup wrecks that model.

Most days, what happens doesn’t match what I expected, because I don’t have good expectations yet. What’s the right price? Who’s the right first customer? What does an investor’s silence mean? Was today a good day or a bad one? I can’t reliably call any of it. Every surprise trips a small alarm: something’s wrong, fix it now. One alarm is fine. It’s a small amount of stress and is part of learning. But stack these alarms day after day and the alarm never resets. You start expecting threats everywhere, and anything unclear starts to feel like danger.

That was the whole of it. The stress didn’t mean I was bad at this. It meant I was somewhere new, where I hadn’t learned what to expect yet. Of course nothing matched. I was still learning the place.

Two traps for founders

The first is comparison. Open any feed and you’ll find a wall of other people’s funding announcements, traction charts, and accelerator wins. Your brain was built to compare you against a village, a few dozen people you actually knew. It was never built to measure you against a global highlight reel that refreshes every time you scroll. So you lose, over and over, against a sample designed to make everyone feel behind. I went deep on this in You’re comparing yourself to people who don’t exist.

The second is identity. At my old job I was “the director who worked on X.” I gave that up on purpose, and now I’m starting over. On day one of a company, you’re no one in particular. The label that used to answer who am I is gone, and losing it stings more than it should, because we’re wired to feel a threat to who we are almost like a threat to the body. There’s nothing weak about that. And the irony isn’t lost on me. I spent a year telling people that life after a career is the place to be, and here I am, reaching for a new title to stand on. Even if it’s one I don’t particularly crave.

What’s helped

None of this is a reason to go back. It’s a reason to work on myself while I work on the company. A few things have helped.

Treat stress as information, not a verdict. When what happens doesn’t match what I expected, I can dig in, get annoyed, and insist the world is wrong. Or I can change what I expect. The first feels better for a minute and costs me later, because I can’t learn anything while I’m busy defending myself. So now I try to ask a better question. Not what’s wrong with me but what is this teaching me that I didn’t know? That turns the stress into information instead of a judgment.

Don’t let the company become your whole identity. When one role carries all of who you are, every bad week in that role feels like the end of the world. So I keep more of myself in view, not less. I’m a son. I’m a father. I’m a runner chasing a sub-20 5K with the stubbornness of someone who’s finished a 50K. I’ve had a meditation practice longer than I’ve had a career. When the company has a rough week, and it will, those parts of me don’t move.

Don’t tie your worth to the scoreboard. Caring about the work is good, and I want to care a lot. But when my worth rises and falls with the numbers, every dip feels like proof I’m not enough. So I try to care about the work and hold the outcome loosely at the same time. Part of that is learning to lose well. You can’t win every week. When something fails, I give it room, get curious about what went wrong, and try to learn from it without turning it into a story about my value as a person.

When you’re really spiraling, stop trying to think your way out. Some days the rut is too deep, and no amount of clever reasoning gets me out, because the problem isn’t in my head, it’s in my body. On those days I move. A hard run calms me down faster than any pep talk. A long stretch outside, away from screens, does in two hours what a week of willpower can’t. And a quiet sit with my breath puts me back in my body when my mind won’t let go.

But knowing isn’t doing

The four points leave something out. I fail at them, often.

I’ll tell you to treat stress as information, then spend an evening revisiting an investor reply for information which might not even be there. I’ll tell you not to watch the scoreboard, then open the dashboard before I’ve said good morning to my kids. I’ll tell you to move instead of spiral, then scroll for half an hour looking through the code to make sure the idea is still sound.

Knowing the mechanism doesn’t switch it off. The wiring doesn’t go quiet just because you’ve named it.

So this isn’t a thirty-day fix. It’s a practice I keep coming back to. The goal was never to feel no stress. It’s to catch it sooner, hold it more lightly, and be a little kinder to myself while I’m in it.

Still learning the place

I still get stressed. I expect I will for a while, because I’m early in learning a world I picked precisely because I didn’t know it yet.

But I don’t read the stress as proof I made a mistake. It’s what it feels like to be somewhere new, before you’ve found your footing, which is exactly where I wanted to be when I left. The work is hard, and I want it to be. The stress was never the price of the work. It was the price of learning to navigate a life I hadn’t lived yet.

I’m still learning. That’s exactly what I left to do.