Waking Up In the Middle of the Night - Stress Relief for Entrepreneurs: Watch Star Trek and do Yoga

Recently, I was having lunch with an entrepreneur friend, who was back in Silicon Valley from Russia, and we were discussing the recently released Russian edition of my book, Zen Entrepreneurship, which he had seen with its Russian title,  Biznes v poze lotosa, which  translates roughly to “business in the lotus position”.

At some point in the conversation, he asked me what techniques – meditation, Yoga or otherwise I might recommend for him, because he found himself “waking up in the middle of the night” worrying about his business.  His business issues were even making their way into his dreams, he said.  Was there some way to prevent this?

My first reaction was of recognition. This has happened to me often, and I’ve heard many other entrepreneurs say the same thing over the years. it occurred to me that this must be very common for most business owners — whether you’re self employed, running a small business, or running a startup that has raised millions of dollars.
It is very hard to “disconnect” from the business, particularly during stressful times. In fact, it might be more surprising if you are running a startup and not worrying about the startup in the middle of the night. This article is about some of the causes and ways to deal with entrepreneurial stress, from both western and eastern perspectives.

The really hard thing about startups

I’ve often said that startups are hard, but this doesn’t mean that they are hard work. The thing that makes startups hard is not the amount of hours you have to put in — it’s that you really can’t avoid “taking your work” home with you.
This seems to be true whether your startup is suffering from not having enough money (like many bootstrapped startups) or if you’ve raised millions of dollars in VC or angel funds. In the case of CEOs who have investors, there’s nothing like the sobering realization that they put all that money into you with a certain set of expectations, and those expectations are not being met (since most startups have over optimistic business plans, most startups don’t make their initial numbers).
Even startups that succeed will often flail around for a while before they hit their second (or third) wind. It’s during times like these that stress that’s been building up little by little can suddenly start to feel like an un-liftable weight on your shoulders.
This is compounded by what I call the “self-confidence problem”. Entrepreneurs tend to be people who believe in their own capabilities — and that might have been true in school, where how much they learned was usually a function of how many hours they put in, or even in their previous job, where they were evaluated for a promotion based on their own contributions in relation to other employees.
If something requires hard work, figures the would-be entrepreneur, I can handle that. This usually leads to the belief that working harder can make you more successful. That might be true generally, but when it comes to startups in particular, while putting in long hours is usually necessary, it’s also not sufficient for success. The thing that can be frustrating for so many entrepreneurs is that, sometimes whether a startup succeeds or not is not always under their direct control.
There are plenty of startups where the founders work their tails off, but that don’t make it. There are a million things that can go wrong — you could hit the market too early (or too late), funding which was easy to come by in a boom market suddenly dries up and you find your ship aground prematurely. On the flip side, I’ve seen successful entrepreneurs who had great successful exits because the market was hot, but whose companies would have otherwise failed as stand-alone entities had they come even a year earlier or a year later.

Why Startups are Harder than MIT: What Could Go Wrong

To solidify this point, I’d say that I worked much harder in terms of number of hours spent when I was a student at MIT than I did at most of my startups. Pulling all nighters, usually because a problems set was due the next morning, or cramming for exams, was common-place. The thing is, even though I was working hard, I don’t think I was ever as stressed out at MIT as I have been in my various startups. OK, I might not always have gotten straight A’s, but I knew that as long as I put in the time, I could get a decent grade.
In a startup, rarely is the result a simple matter of how hard you work (or surprisingly, how much money you spend). Things always have a way of going differently than you expect. If you are the founder/CEO this usually means you’re waking up int he middle of the night worried about some thing or another that either has gone wrong, or could go wrong
What could go wrong? Plenty.
Your first major customer cancels an order. The round of funding you were counting on doesn’t come through. Apple (or Facebook or Google) kicks you out of the app store, which was responsible for 100% of your sales. A co-founder has already vested their stock and suddenly quits. A recently hired, much anticipated, star hire isn’t what you expected, or maybe a long-time super-valuable employee decides to leave for a competitor. You miss your projections, not by a little bit, but by more than a million dollars! Or maybe, a recently-fired employee sneaks into your office and steals your laptop, a fact you only know because the police came in and got the surveillance footage from your landlord, and you have to decide whether to press charges.
Yes all of those things have happened. And that’s just in startups that I have personally been involved with. I’m sure there’s a whole world of startups out there with problems that I’ve never encountered.
Whew! No wonder it’s hard not to be stressed out as an entrepreneur.

Brad Feld’s First Rule: You aren’t alone.

I was recently interviewing well known entrepreneur-turned VC Brad Feld for my upcoming book, Startup Myths, and I asked him what advice he’d have for entrepreneurs going through stressful times.  His first piece of advice was to remember that you are not alone.  Many, many people are going through the same thing with their startups, though they are not out talking about it.

Brad was one of the first in the startup/VC community to talk about depression and the role it’s played in his career.  I’ve seen that many entrepreneurs may find themselves sliding into “mini-depressions” when they’re trudging along and come across intractable problems that they just can’t or don’t want to deal with anymore. (if you haven’t read his blog, it’s at www.feld.com and worth a read).

Remembering you are not alone is a great first step.

This reminded me that when I was doing my very first startup in Cambridge, MA, we had a local group of CEOs of local startups that met every so often — I think it was once a month or so. I used to joke that this was “my CEO therapy” group.
The thing was, being able to talk about the things that were going wrong with a group of people who understand and are going through similar things can be therapeutic in and of itself.
I have to admit, sometimes I would come away feeling much better about my current crisis because someone in the group inevitably would be going through something much worse. For example, I remember once I worried about only have runway for a few months of salary left, when I realized that one of the other members of the group didn’t have enough money to make payroll this month!
This wasn’t some startup version of schadenfreude– rather it was the first step to putting things in perspective, which can lead to taking your own problems in stride and realizing that rarely is it “the end of the world”, even if it seems like it right now.
If you don’t have a support group like this, informally or formally, it might be worth looking into joining or creating one. I’m on my fifth startup, and you’d think by now I wouldn’t need other entrepreneurs who are going through similar things to commiserate with. You’d be wrong.
Can’t you just talk to you co founders, investors, or advisors?
Yes and no. I’ve found that even though investors, advisors, and co-founders can be sympathetic, they often don’t understand the stress that a founder/CEO is going through at the moment. Sometimes the thing that you really need to vent or complain about, the thing that’s causing you all this stress, is your investors, your advisor, or even your co-founder!

Western perspectives and Physiological effects of Stress

When I started to think about techniques that could help my Russian friend, I realized that we all have very different ways of getting and dealing with stress. Exercise, everyone will tell you, almost always helps with stress. I agree, but by itself it may not be enough.
There’s a good explanation of the western chemical viewpoint of momentary, flight or fight stress vs. the kind of chronic stress that entrepreneurs live with, in another article I read recently by entrepreneur Hana Abaza (https://medium.com/@HanaAbaza/stress-startups-and-survival-94c48ec921f2).
Since the human body is designed to deal with a stressful situation like a saber-tooth tiger, the chemicals that the body secretes during stressful times are meant to last as long as the “flight or fight” response lasts. Either you get away and survive or you stay and fight the tiger.
Abaza stresses that being in charge of a startup is more like “chronic” stress, and the physiological issues that it can cause. Coincidentally, she also talks about waking up in the middle of the night during her own startup experience 3 or 4 times a week.

A Yogic View of Stress

Being a mystical as well as practical kind of guy, I believe it’s worth looking beyond just the chemicals to see how we get stressed out and what happens in our mind, body and our energy fields.
It’s pretty easy to see that each person is different and holds their stress differently, resulting in different physiological symptoms. Two people going through the same situation have a very different reaction to how “stressed out” they are.
As an example, I mentioned that I wasn’t really that stressed out at MIT as a student, but some other students took it very differently. Suddenly, not being the smartest person in the room hit at the very core of the valedictorian personality they’d built up over their entire lives up to that point — and this caused more than its fair share of angst, depression and worse.
Wilhelm Reich, who along with Carl Jung was one of Freud’s most esteemed disciples, believed that we hold accumulated stress in the fascia — the connective tissues in between our muscles and our bones. He came up with a therapy that involved learning to breathe as a way to “release” this accumulated stress, which had dramatic physiological results in many of his patients, and many consider him the the grandfather of body-oriented psychotherapy.
Surprisingly, this view coincides very well with the Yogic/Eastern view. From a Yogic point of view, this has to do with our individual personalities, our habitual thought-forms, our karmic tendencies. As we build up stress, we create and hold onto little deformations into our energy fields, called samskaras, which accumulate around our body in previously transparent sheaths called khosas.
Finding ways to relieve that psychological/energetic holding not only reduces stress, it lets go of some of the karmic traces we’ve accumulated, clearing up our energy field and our ability to see the situation clearly. I like to use the analogy of a muddy windshield — it blocks your view of what’s really happening. The clearer it gets, the more easily you can see what’s happening around you, and your role in it, and sometimes that’s enough to give us the perspective to get un-stressed.
In the Buddhist point of view, the ability to let go of all that is locked up in our minds (and by extension our bodies) is what eventually leads to enlightenment.
These samskaras are caused by our “grasping” and “aversion” — reactions we have to the situations we find ourselves in. As we hold these thoughts in both our mind and bodies, we have muddied up our system, leading to a lack of sleep and even dreaming about our problems. One reason we use the term “sleep like a baby”, is that babies haven’t accumulated enough “stress” or “samskaras” to disturb their sleep (at least in this lifetime).
In Tibetan Buddhist traditions, there are two kinds of karma: the “big karma” which might involve bad deeds like killing someone or cheating someone, and “little karma”, which are things that have made their way into our minds which we have a had a strong reaction to — exactly what causes the samskaras in Yogic traditions.
To resolve the “big karma” might require lifetimes of work. However, it’s the little “karmic traces” make their way into our dreams, particularly the ones that seem to be regurgitating things we had been worried about all day. So how do you release some of these karmic traces and reduce some of the stress?

Some Tips and Techniques From My Own Experience

My own personal mantra when I am stressed out in a startup is “Watch Star Trek, Walk by the Bay, and Do Yoga”.  These aren’t meant to be actual techniques (you might hate Star Trek, not live near the Bay, and find Yoga to be ridiculous), but rather three different ways that I approach dealing with stress.

•        Taking walks in Nature.  There’s a little park in Mountain View, just down the road from my office, and only yards away from Google, that always helps me to deal with stressful situations.  It’s called Shoreline and there are paths that are near the San Francisco Bay, and when I’m walking I can see the mountains to the west (green, tree covered), the water of the bay, and the mountains to the east (which look more like the desert).  There is also a nice breeze coming in from the bay (OK it’s not always nice- sometimes it stinks lol).   The thing is, there’s something about gazing at mountains and feeling a breeze going through your body and energy field that has the effect of “loosening up” the things that you are holding – mentally, emotionally, and in your body.  What I’ve noticed is that even if I’m holding a lot of stuff in at the beginning of the walk, by the end my body is more relaxed and I’ve let go of some of the things that are bothering me.  You can find a place like this in your neighborhood.
•       Watching Star Trek.  This usually gets a laugh when I tell people about it.  The truth is, that  I find we all have certain types of fiction that not only “take us away” from where we are, but somehow feed our soul.  For me it’s usually certain kinds of science fiction or fantasy.  For you it may be Sex and the City or Reality TV!  Well maybe not Reality TV, but you get the general idea.  Find something that you can watch that “feeds your soul”.   For me, watching Star Trek brings back memories of childhood and anticipation of great things in the future, and somehow links to something deep in my soul – maybe because I’m an explorer at heart.  Whatever it is, take an hour every day to watch an episode of a TV show that does it for you or read something that takes you into this kind of feeling. 
•       Doing Yoga.  I’ve already mentioned Yoga. In fact, the original point of Yoga was to start to dissolve some of the samskaras that we are holding. Too often, in the west, Yoga and exercise are considered the same thing.  I had one Yoga teacher tell me that I'd probably be sore the next day.   She was right. I was not only sore the whole next day, which might work for some people, but didn’t work for me- that's not the kind of Yoga that helps me to release stress.  The key is to find Yoga which an allow you to do stretching and to release, a kind of meditation for the body which allows you to gently release the samskaras building up in your body and mind and energy field.  You’re not training to be a boxer or a weightlifter or a football player!  If your Yoga isn’t doing it for you, I’d be happy to recommend some DVDs or books that have the kind of Yoga.
•       Meditation.  There are many studies showing that regular meditation has health benefits and leads to stress relief.  There are many different techniques of meditation, but at the heart you are trying to calm the mind and the tumultuous thoughts that we are all caught in the middle of. I think of us as one of those snow-globes that has been shaken up, thoughts are flying every which way and it’s difficult to see. A short meditation can do wonders for letting the snow settle down and get a clear view of what's happening. 
•       Use Your Work As Meditation.  Being mindful at work can have wonders for not only your concentration but on your level of stress. Rather than worrying about “making payroll next month” (which may be a real problem that you have to deal with), when you are writing some code or doing a spreadsheet or having a meeting, focus your mind and attention on the task at hand.  I call this “using your work as meditation”.   Your mind will inevitably wander.  You bring it back. This is just like meditating but it is more about keeping your mind on what you are doing.  If you do this right, you won’t be thinking about the million things that “could go wrong” if your startup runs out of money next month.  You’ll be thinking about whatever task you are focused on. 
•        Breathing exercises.  There are many breathing exercises that can help you to release that which we are holding – i.e. that which is causing us stress.  If you are finding yourself unable to sleep, doing a slow breathing exercise is a great way to get back to sleep – almost any rhythmical breathing exercise can work.  Here’s a simple one I learned recently:  breath in fully (even to places that you don’t normally breath into) expanding your lungs as much as you can, then breathe out fully, much longer than you normally would.  Repeat 10 times.  After 10 times, hold your breath for 20 seconds.  Then start the 10 breath cycle again. If you’re like me, somewhere in the 10 breaths, you’ll lose count of which breath you are on and end up asleep.  There are of course many different types of breathing exercises – breath of fire (not recommended for falling asleep), alternate nostril breathing, etc.
•      Get a Massage.  Since stress is being held in the body, it's amazing how great you can feel after having some body work done.  This doesn't make your stress go away, but it does let you realize that there's something beyond the stress, so that when you start to feel it again, it ends up being a little less "all-encompassing".   

From an eastern point of view, stress isn’t purely a chemical thing, it is the result of our thoughts, emotions, and new “reactions” adding onto the accumulation of samskaras we have in the past (our “karmic traces”).   

Sometimes I like to think of being an entrepreneur as karma+  plan - i.e. we are accelerating our reactions and building up karmic traces with every stressful situation and our reactions to it, which is why we so often end up dreaming about our business problems.  This is why I believe entrepreneurs need techniques like Yoga and meditation even more than most people, because the stress that builds up  can make our lives hell and being off your game can have much more immediate consequences for an entrepreneur who's running a startup.

So, the next time you find yourself stressed out, take a deep breath. Remember you are not alone, and there are other startup CEOs going through what you’re going through. Then, do your own version of my personal mantra: Take a walk by the bay, watch Star Trek, or do Yoga!

Recent Articles on the Zen Of Entrepreneurship

There were a couple of articles recently about the content of "Zen Entrepreneurship: Walking the Path of the Career Warrior", on a few popular entrepreneurship websites here in the US and in Europe.

I think they provide a good summary of how to apply the principles that the book is about to a startup or to any career path, really.   Rather than repeat the content here, you can read them at their original source.

The first was an article I wrote as a guest contributor for Tech Crunch, probably the most popular startup blog in the Silicon Valley, titled  The Zen of Entrepreneurship (Tech Crunch). It outlined four key principles that I think all entrepreneurs can apply to stay more conscious of how they are unconsciously affecting the course of their business, whether they want them to or not.

The second was on Venture Village, a popular european startup and career success website, titled:  How To Attain Spiritual and Work-Life Bliss.  It tackled the same principles but from a different angle, of how to have more balance and use your intuition in your career.

Zen Entrepreneurship : Second Edition Now Available and a Bestseller!

“I started meditating, a path of personal growth, because I thought it could help accelerate my career. By the time I was done, I would begin to view my career as a way of accelerating my personal growth. I realized I had it backwards.”

                        -from Zen Entrepreneurship, Rizwan Virk

The second, expanded edition of my book, Zen Entrepreneurship: Walking the Path of the Career Warrior – was launched on Amazon recently and I'm happy to announce it's become an international bestseller in four countries!

Buy it on Amazon.com now:  http://www.amazon.com/dp/0983056919/

Special Promotion - Get hundreds of dollars in free gifts: http://www.zenentrepreneur.com/book

Follow the book on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/zenentrepreneur

What is this book about?

Zen Entrepreneurship reads like 3 books rolled into one:  a business tale, a spiritual adventure, and a handbook.

On one level, it’s the story of my very first startup, which I founded with my  good friend from MIT, Mitch Liu.  We didn’t really know what we were doing, but were very ambitious and to our surprise, the startup took off, and for a while it was one of the hottest startups on the East coast.  We had numerous articles written about us and Information Week called us one of 8 startups that CIOs of major corporations should watch. One this level, the book can be read as an interesting “startup tale”.

On another level, it’s a book about a path of spiritual growth.  Around this same time, I started meditating and working with a set of spiritual teachers and learning about “the hidden worlds”.  Back in those days, I didn’t care much about spiritual growth – or topics like dreams, finding my calling in life, karma, energetic patterns, synchronicity – I just wanted something that would help me mentally focus and have the mental stamina that a startup requires.  What I found was that the two were interrelated - more than I realized.  At this level, you can read it as a "tale of power" of a student being mentored - like The Way of the Peaceful Warrior, or the Teachings of don Juan. 

The third level, which is the most important in my opinion, is that this book is a handbook for bringing spiritual development and your work into one.  The Buddha once said: “Your work in life is to find your work and give your heart to it!”.  Rather than having your personal growth “over here”, while your work and your career is “over there”, the book describes the “Path of the Career Warrior”, which is a way to integrate the two paths into one.  In fact, the issues you are struggling with in your personal life and/or your meditation, are the same issues you will likely be dealing with in your career. If you have a startup, it’s even worse!

What have people said about the book?

“Tales of Power meets the Peaceful Warrior... in Silicon Valley! It's entertaining, humble, insightful and valuable - not just to entrepreneurs, but to anyone looking to manifest their dreams and make a difference in the world.”


           —Foster Gamble, Creator and Host, Thrive: What on Earth Will It Take

“You will come away with insight about yourself, guidance … and knowledge that you may not be able to acquire anywhere else save the mountaintops of the Himalayas.”


—Bookreview.com

 “Riz Virk brings the wisdom of ancient Eastern traditions into a purely Western setting. The result is an often hilarious but always insightful book that will change how you view career success and help you discover and walk your own unique path.”


—Marc Allen, author of Visionary Business, CEO and co-founder of New World Library

“Zen Entrepreneurship changed my life, it confirmed for me that 'clues' exist in the world around us and are powerful. I shared this book with every one of my clients from that point forward. Powerful. A must read... it reinforces that there is a bigger guide within us if we choose to listen”


—Lorin Beller, author of From Entrepreneur to Big Fish: 7 Principles of Wild Succes

What’s new in the second edition?

There’s at least 50 pages of new content based on feedback from readers in the years since I wrote the first edition  The new content transforms the book from a “fun story tor read” to a handbook, with summaries, principles, and exercises at the end of each chapter.

Many readers have told me they go back to the book every year to “refresh” on some of the business and spiritual principles described in the  story.  The second edition is  definitely the one to do this with – this edition is both a story and a manual for living the 14 principles of the Career Warrior.

Where can I get it?  What’s special on June 4^th!

If you buy the book June 4^th, you will receive a set of bonus gifts, worth hundreds of dollars from myself and other bestselling authors, spiritual and business coaches/advisors.  This includes a preview of my next book about synchronicity, Treasure Hunt,  an ebook from Betsy Chaisse, co creator of the wildly popular film, What the Bleep do we know?, Magical mystical images from visionary artist Ellen Mcdonough, and many, many more!

Special Promotion is here:  http://www.zenentrepreneur.com/book

Buy it here:   http://www.amazon.com/dp/0983056919/

Follow me on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/zenentrepreneur

The Curious Case of Steve Jobs: Intuition and the Entrepreneur

“Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

- Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement, 2005

Wow it’s been a long time since I’ve written an entry (the last once was written just before I sold my iPhone gaming company, Gameview Studios, to DeNA) in 2010. I’d like to re-start my blog with two topics that are dear and near to my heart: following your intuition and the death of Steve jobs.

Steve’s death on October 5, 2011 caused a literal outflowing of emotion, analysis and opining: hundreds, perhaps thousands of pages have been written in the last month alone since his death. And that’s not counting Walter Isaacson’s 600 plus page biography.

Some of these focused on his achievements at Apple and Pixar, some on his tumultuous personality, some on his “insanely great” products like the Mac and the iPhone, some on how he ran Apple after his comeback, some on the impact he’s had on (count them) at least five different industries, some comparing him to Walt Disney and Henry Ford combined.

So...what’s left to say?

For me one of the most inspiring (and overlooked) aspects of Jobs’ career and philosophy was his reliance on his own intuition even in the face of the “noise of others’ opinions”. I haven’t seen much written on it, so using his own words as much as possible, here goes:

Most writers about successful business persons like to try to reduce what they did to a set of pithy “principles” you can follow to be just “like Mike”. With Jobs, I think that’s pretty much impossible. It’s like asking for the “step-by-step formula” for how to “think different”! If it could be reduced to a formula…well you get the point.

Intuition vs. Analysis

Jobs attributed much of his success to his ability to follow his own “inner knowing”, even when analysts and the “experts” disagreed. He was quoted as saying he hated focus groups because consumers “don’t know what they want until we show it to them”. Instead, he insisted on having an “intuitive” feel for when a product was “just right” and when it felt “wrong”.

This is pretty much the opposite of what you will learn from business schools (even more progressive west coast ones like Stanford) about building products and companies. It’s even different from what most venture capitalists and startup gurus here in the valley will tell you - which is to analyze a market, make sure the analysis confirms that the market is “big enough”, then interview the people in that market to find out their needs. It’s kind of ironic that one of the biggest icons of Silicon Valley would disagree with the way business is being done here.

Tim Cook, who replaced Jobs as the CEO at Apple, talks about following his own intuition when he decided to join Apple after meeting with Jobs. “Engineers are taught to make a decision analytically but there are times when relying on gut or intuition are indispensable.”

Where did Jobs get this mindset from? A big part of his reliance on intuition vs. analysis came as a result of his own search for truth. When he was young, he dropped out of Reed College (again the opposite of what logic would tell you to do if you want to be a successful entrepreneur) and followed his own intuition down several notable paths.

The first path, his quest for enlightenment, led him first on a trip to India chasing some guru, and later transformed into his study of Zen meditation here in the Bay area. “The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do, “ said Jobs. “They use their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world.”

He concluded with: “Intuition is a very powerful thing.” (src: Isaacson's biography).

Continuing his search for enlightenment when he came back to the US in the 1970’s he experimented with Zen meditation (an interest he kept up for the rest of his life) and mind-altering drugs (which as far as I know, he did not keep up for the rest of his life). Now I can’t speak for LSD (since I’ve never taken it), but I can vouch that meditation can be indispensible for learning about different states of mind and teaching you how to follow your own intuition.

Steve Jobs said: “If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time, it does calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things- that’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment.”

According to his longtime friend, Daniel Kottke, who’d known him since his college days: “Steve is very much Zen. It was a deep influence. You see it in his whole approach of stark, minimalist aesthetics, intense focus.”

Zen influenced Steve Jobs in other ways too – including his appreciation of a minimalist ethic that rubbed off on his insistence that user interfaces and products be as simple as possible. When creating great products like the Macintosh and the original iPod, Jobs talked about having this intuitive knowing when something had met this ethic of simplicity and when it could be improved. Although he wasn't always right, he was right way more often than he was wrong.

Connecting the Dots: One thing leads to another

Of course, it’s not always easy to follow your intuition when it’s telling you something that’s different from what others tell you should “logically” be done. Jobs own life is a good example – ranging from his decision to drop out of Reed to what looked like a very poor investment decision to fund Pixar, a money-losing operation that he bought from George Lucas for $10 million in the eighties, and then continued to fund for years (to the tune of $50 million of his own personal money), until they came out with Toy Story in the nineties and became the landmark success story we know about today.

I think it only happens if you can have confidence in yourself and your own ability to find what’s right for you. Following your intuition often means follow your own path, even if you can’t see exactly where it’s taking you.

Jobs often gave an example from the time when he dropped out of college. He said that once he’d officially dropped out, he could take the classes that he “wanted to take” rather than the ones that “they were requiring him to take”, showing a streak of his habitual disrespect for authority.

He saw a flyers on campus for a calligraphy class, and decided to follow his intuition and take this class, where he learned about proportional fonts, serif vs. non-serif fonts. Jobs would say about this time: “It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life.”

Later, when it came time to design the Mac, he insisted that there be “fonts” of different types, rather than the usual stale green fonts that were popular at the time. Again in his own words:

“And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.”

This was perhaps the most important example of what Jobs referred to as “connecting the dots” – when something in your life unexpectedly connects to something at a far later date, but you are completely unaware of the influence it’ll have at the time.

I think that most successful entrepreneurs benefit from “connecting the dots” – bringing together seemingly unconnected experiences into a single whole that somehow is more than the sum of the parts. How do you know? You don’t – you have to have the courage though to follow your intuition.

I’ll end, as I began, with Steve Jobs in his own words from the now famous Stanford speech:

“Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”