Mental Health vs Founder
The reality behind the “wins”
Very few things irk me. But one thing that does is inauthenticity.
Let me explain.
We’ve had the pleasure of meeting so many of you through this journey as we went through the earliest versions of Dreami, pivoted our approach and started doubling-down…it’s hard not to get emotional thinking of the progress that has been made in this year alone.
But we wouldn’t be staying true to ourselves if we only painted a rosy picture of how much progress has been made. We get pretty vulnerable on Twitter of what the ups and downs behind our incredibly ambitious mission really looks like.
Often times in our career, we feel so much pressure to put up a strong front of significant progress, when inside, it can feel like quite the opposite.
There truly is a “LinkedIn vs Reality” discrepancy that isn’t discussed to the extent that “Instagram vs Reality” now is. In fact, we made a social post that is still one of our best performing posts about this very topic:
So we’re taking the first step to showing you what’s really happening behind the scenes of building Dreami.
Some of the ups… :
Some of the downs… :
We all know to some extent that there is an insurmountable amount of pressure that founders face every single day: bugs, critical feedback, quick turnaround times, customer support, mountains of emails, bills, fundraising…the list goes on.
I’ve been on meetings where my lack of experience was questioned, further enhancing my ever growing imposter syndrome. Some days, my anxiety would be so bad that my entire day is spent rethinking what I could have prevented or done better. Some weeks, I wake up at 6am panicking about everything that needs to be done ASAP.
And then, I have a “good week”, and I forget it all. I fall in love with being a founder all over again and can’t wait to get back into it. The highs are very high and the lows are some of the lowest. It’s a vicious cycle that can be akin to a toxic relationship.
The mission that I fell in love with reminds me of what it is all for.
I hesitated on writing this and publishing it. This wouldn’t be the type of blog post you’d expect to read on a “corporate blog”. You may think this is a post that should be saved for a personal blog or private Instagram. That’s what we’re trying to dispel here though — there is no clear line between someone’s personal life vs professional life.
It’s time to remove the filter.
