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LIFE HACKS FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS

The High Price of Exhaustion: Why Entrepreneurs Can’t Afford to Be Tired

A true story about deleting a file I shouldn’t have deleted

Entrepreneurs are always busy. There is always something more you can do for the success of your company, and a company is never “finished” in a way a building is finished after construction ends.

In German, we often call entrepreneurs selbständig — the direct translation means “independent”. However, taking the word apart is more accurate: Entrepreneurs are working by themselves (selbst), and entrepreneurs are working all the time (ständig).

Nothing to romanticize here. At Yonder, we thankfully don’t nurture a culture of bragging about long hours or staying in the office longer than the boss. But yes, there are many situations where we have to put in long hours to get all the urgent stuff done.

Very often, my co-founders and I are the first ones to chip in extra hours: It’s usually when extensive RFPs with tight deadlines need to be answered, or when we prepare financing rounds. Such events give extra work because you can’t halt supporting customers or fixing bugs just because of an RFP or a financing round. Remember, it’s selbst and ständig.