Dear "Bad" Days, Fuck Off

Whether you are the founder of a tech startup or quite frankly, any kind of business you’ve likely experienced one of these “bad” days that I’m about to talk about. You know the kind where you wake up, feeling great, “today is going to be a good day,” you tell yourself as you sit down at your desk, wake up your computer, and as the display comes to life you notice your inbox: not a single email reply from those potential customers you reached out to.

“It’s alright,” you say to yourself, “It’s still early, anyway.” You then start trying to troubleshoot why the conference call service you use suddenly no longer works properly for you, which of course, you only found out the prior week when two demo’s in a row experienced the same technical difficulty. Spending way too much time on it, you still can’t resolve the issue, but have found you can get it to work in another web browser so for now you decide to make do with that for your upcoming demo that’s now approximately 30 minutes away (and you haven’t had the chance to fully prepare).

Demo time! You’re pumped, you’re ready to do your thing. But it doesn’t end the way you had hoped, it didn’t go terribly, after all you got valuable feedback and they got your vision and where you’re headed… now you just need to get those new features built out to “wow” them.

Oh, look at that, some email arrived! You scan the subjects and notice someone replied! You open it and it’s positive! Nice.

You talk with your developer(s) and check in with how things are progressing, “making progress,” they say. Meanwhile you’ve seen an early teaser of the feature being built and are jumping out of your skin for it to be done. “Relax,” you tell yourself, “you want it to be amazing — not some half-assed rush job.”

Back to that inbox, “Oh this looks interesting,” you think as you scroll through your various new messages. You decide to reply to the “interesting” one and see what comes of it. Oh, they want to setup a call? By this time you’ve checked out their website and it seems legitimate so why not.

Now that that’s scheduled, what else is in here that needs attending… Oh here’s a newsletter you read, it opens, you skim for things that pique your curiosity only to notice a few job listings being advertised, “I could totally do that,” you say to yourself. Perhaps you click on one or two, quickly reading the job descriptions, “yeah, check. check. check. definite check,” you think to yourself before you snap out of it and close the tabs in the browser.

You then make your way over to your bank’s website, login and check your business checking account. Sigh. That’s depressing. You close the tab and decide to take a small break — those are important after all. You feel beaten down, frustrated, and anxious all at once. There’s a moment when you go, “maybe I should just give up,” but then tomorrow arrives, along with some renewed hope and a fresh perspective, and you do what you do best: get back to work building your dream.