Kinda just feel like shit. No real reason. I was on a walk with Mom and Zoey and super grumbly and she remarked “wow you’re always a roller coaster” (in saying that I was moody). One of the most notable pieces of advice Fabio gave me with respect to being a founder was that the emotional toll was the hardest part of it all.
Fabio was 1st hire at 0x protocol. I asked him how applicable his experience as a founding engineer was to actually being a founder, now that he’s CEO of Blowfish. He replied that his most unforeseen challenge was the emotional impact; that you had investors, employees, and customers all banking on your personal promises.. You’re making sales based on how your team will ship, but that is solely guaranteed by your own reputation. And if one chain breaks, the engine stops running.
I actually think about this a lot. About how I can improve not just as an engineer or a product manager or a communicator, but in more abstract ways of how I can be more attuned to my own emotions, and have them take on higher load. I wonder how I can be more emotionally strong. There was a twitter meme something like “you must train muscles to failure for them to grow, why would your mind be any different?”
Somewhere in my journal or discord or something I wrote about how I have higher emotional variance than I did for a while 2020-23 because I was afraid of getting hurt/rejected then. That was the case in maybe H1 2024, but now I’ve reverted to my own self. There’s not really any room positive prediction error in my life; things which can go better than I can reasonable expect them to go. This is the first time in a long time.
In more ways than I initially acknowledged, getting to know Sarah was super formative to my current state of being. I’m much more confident and less rejection prone. The outcome was pretty much the maximally annoying outcome that I could have proleptically feared, and yet, like always, I was more fine than I’d have expected — actually, there were numerous positives. So why be scared at anything, ever? And if I could somehow get a girl interested in me whom was previously interested in the cofounder of a billion dollar protocol, then who can’t I get? Not that it was a source of confidence whatsoever. But the whole arc made me stronger.
I’m a pretty sensitive person. I don’t know if I would call myself emotional like mom/Eugene do; when I’m by myself, as I often am, I don’t really display (or feel) anything other than grumbles. In some way it makes me wonder if my emotions are largely performative? But it definitely is the case that I’m easily upset. You’d think that being easily/commonly upset would make me less so in the future, but it hasn’t. Maybe I’m a neurotic person? For a while (before getting into crypto), I was confused by why almost nobody I spent time around “wanted it” as bad as I did. Then I realized that a lot of my “wanting it” was a symptom of being a bit of a neurotic person. Some of my most ambitious friends these days are even more neurotic people. I’m not sure if I’m just exhibiting some Berkson’s Paradox right now, or if there’s actual correlation. But I guess my realization is that I’m pretty internally neurotic, even if I’m pretty good at not externally showing it.
I made an OC graph for neuroticism/success berkson’s paradox (i wish it had positive slope but sadly I’m lazy, so the x-axis is non-neruoticism)
in a way, I realized this long long ago, but never really internalized this? 