Embrace How Messed Up You Are

As a startup Founder, I've got a very long list of issues with myself, and that's just fine.

Want to hear my list?

• I'm obsessive. I can't stop working even when I hate what I'm doing.
• I'm hell-bent on control even though I know what I do offers next to none.
• I ignore successes and play failures on an infinite loop.
• I have zero attention span; I've already forgotten the opening line of this article.

Sound familiar? Maybe awful? It used to be for me. But at some point, I stopped trying so hard to "fix" me and started asking myself, "What is it about my fucked-up-ness that I can harness for good?"

What if there isn't a fix but instead a whole new world that opens up when we embrace how messed up we are?

The False Prophet of Fix

Hundreds of times per day, someone is trying to "fix me." It's the endless firehose of emails, social media, and commercials trying to make me calmer, happier, richer, fitter, or worse, younger. The message across the board is clear: "I'm broken, and someone else has the fix."

They don't.

That's not because what they are selling doesn't work; it's because not everything wrong with us is a problem. Don't get me wrong, there's no downside to me going to the gym more often or resting more. This isn't to say that all fixes are bad. But perhaps some of my "broken things" are actually my greatest assets.

Embrace the Chaos

When I was a kid, my extreme ADHD prevented me from ever studying or passing a test. I had about five seconds of attention span in a classroom. I nearly failed out of high school and dropped out of college. That's usually when parents try to "cure" the issue with therapy, drugs, and an endless amount of discipline.

But I'd come to learn later that the reason I couldn't pay attention was because my mind wasn't meant to work in a serial manner. I was processing things massively in parallel, like a quantum computer, or as I describe it, "what it would be like to watch TV in your mind if someone just held the 'channel' button down forever."

Instead of trying to fix my attention span, I embraced the chaos. I pushed myself to think in every direction at once. It turned out that instead of doing one useful thing, I could do dozens of them at once, running constantly as if I had ten minds. I built my life and my startups (nine of them!) to harness that energy in a way that very few people could operate.

If I had tried to "fix" that problem, I would have lost one of my greatest assets.

I Got 99 Problems and I Won't Fix One

And that got me thinking: how many other “problems” have I spent years trying to eliminate that were actually just badly labeled strengths?

• My anxiety? That’s my early-warning radar. It’s the reason I can spot problems long before they explode.
• My obsession with control? That pursuit is what helps me convert chaos into companies.
• My inability to rest? It's a reflection of the fountain of passion I have, and I'm damn glad it's still raging.

That's not to say that every quirk is a good thing or that there's no room for improvement. But before we try to stamp out every possible problem, we need to ask ourselves what we stand to lose when we abandon our gifts.

"Wait, you mean self-acceptance? Say it ain't so!"

The older I get, the more I realize self-acceptance isn’t some passive act of surrender. It’s strategic. The trick isn’t to fight every impulse; it’s to assign each one a job.

When I stopped trying to become the “balanced” Founder and just worked with the wiring I’ve got, everything got lighter. Not easier, just lighter.

Because there’s nothing wrong with being a little bit messed up. We all are. We just need to pick what's worth fixing.

In Case You Missed It

How Do I Leave My Startup Stress At Work? While startup stress might not ever diminish completely, how we manage it can help us navigate balance in our lives as Founders.

The Emotional Cost of Being a Founder When we talk about building startups, we talk about lots of costs: Staffing costs, the cost of capital, cost per acquisition, and opportunity cost. But we never talk about the biggest cost – the emotional cost.

Why Do I Feel So Alone? No one ever tells you in the “Starting a Company” brochure that the journey will not only include crippling anxiety, drowning in personal debt, and endless challenges — but also a healthy dose of personal loneliness.