Internal Fossil Fuels

Fracking my own anxiety for a decade and calling it ambition.

During the lead up to raising my last startup’s series A, I was forcing myself out of bed, popping a vyvanse with my first sip of water, and getting on 6-8 hours of back to back calls before doing my full day of normal work. I’d then collapse at 10 or 11pm and start over the next morning.

Number must go up, and I was responsible for the number.

Every time we would lose a big deal to a competitor, I would seeth with rage, and get another hit of motivation. When I was blocked because a teammate didn’t work fast enough, I’d tighten the anxious ball in my chest, feel a burning glow of desire to keep going, and do the work myself.

Body buzzing, heart pounding, I’d send more emails, arrange more meetings, push more work out.

During this period I was inhumanly productive. We got more funding, and with the fear of running out of money dissipated, I slumped into a profound tiredness that lasted weeks.

While laying in bed for a week to recover, I thought a lot about why I was doing all this shit.

Starting companies is cool, but I’ve never really worked because I wanted to make lots of money. I read the now-defamed Africa-microfinance guy in college and drank the kool aid. My friends were people working on “things that matter”. If someone asked what I did at a party I’d tell them about “The Mission”.

Staring up at the ceiling from my bed mid-afternoon, I caught myself hating the fucking mission. Hating the thousand sales calls. Hating the investor check-ups. Hating my cofounder and hating myself.

The seething when we lost a deal wasn’t competitive fire. It was anger at my own failure to win. The tight ball in my chest wasn’t focus. It was anxiety about letting people down. The 2am emails weren’t passion. They were fear of running out of money.

My dedication wasn’t self sacrifice for some abstract mission statement, it was a raw desire to be acknowledged.

I had been fracking my own anxiety for a decade and calling it ambition.

I was running on internal fossil fuels.

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Fear, anxiety, frustration are motivational in a very specific way. The mind uses the feeling to cause action by creating pain.

The feeling is the initial spark - the pain/frustration/anger whatever. Then, the desire to relieve the pain creates motivation towards action. The action then relieves the pain temporarily, and the cycle continues.

I’ve spent years meditating to try to get a hold of my internal landscape.

Even so, burning dirty motivational fuels was load-bearing for my whole world- personality, work, relationships, everything. So it was only visible to me when it got to this extreme point.

Seeing the pattern clearly once was enough to make me decide I didn’t like it.

One time, during this initial stage of realization, I woke up normally at 6am and went to get my morning fix of hyper-caffeinated drink and broke down crying in the car in front of the store. The phrase kept replaying through my mind: “I don’t want to hurt myself anymore.”

I then drove home empty handed, cancelled my meetings, and took the day off.

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The alternative to “dirty fuels” like fear and anxiety is wholesome motivations.

I’m not talking about bullshit wholesomeness like my party-approved “the mission” motivation - that’s typically just coded fear of being small or something.

Wholesome, clean fuels are softer. It’s a measured satisfaction at doing a good job that lingers to the end of the day. It’s the feeling of “I know I did my best, I can learn from this” after something went wrong instead of the furious “next time I’ll win.” It’s the reassurance of “I believe I have the ability to handle whatever comes up” replacing the frantic anxiety to solve a problem RIGHT NOW.

Wholesome motivations also seem to have less “peak” to them. The energy builds and compounds over time instead of being blasted into you when something spikes your cortisol.

So you trade less peak for a higher floor. You do your best and feel satisfied. The next day it’s just a bit better. And so on.

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Transitioning to clean energy sucks.

The moment you stop feeding the fear and anxiety, the engine cuts out. For me, my motivation and drive initially cratered.

After deciding to go green, I naively thought I’d just feel better about doing the same stuff.I thought clean fuel would feel like the dirty fuel minus the bad parts.

Nope. Instead I often actually feel completely disinterested in the stuff that used to matter.

I’d regularly power up the grindset-machine only to find that it just didn’t turn on. I had to ask myself a thousand times: why the fuck SHOULD I care about sending this email, if not to alleviate my fear of failure?

Try caring about making money. Meh. Try caring about being a good person. Nope. Try caring about the outcomes. Whatever.

I did a thousand experiments like this. Each time I’d ask: why should I care? Is that version of caring just another dirty fuel in disguise? If so, what else could I try?

Eventually I figured out a few things that worked.

Firstly, clean fuels are a fundamentally different kind of thing. They don’t just work right when you need them to. The clean fuel for an email might be something ridiculously slow and complex: “I want to feel the calm satisfaction of knowing I did what was in my power to improve my situation at the end of this day/week/month”.

Secondly, related to the first, clean fuels require different storage and retrieval. To feel the “know I did my best” motivation, could take weeks of consistent plodding effort. Every day, every meeting, every email I would try to summon a tiny version of the feeling. Getting a taste kept me anchored to the bigger version, but was not an easy swap-in replacement for the “LETS FUCKING GO NOW” fire of fear or frustration.

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All of this trial and error made the transition extremely hard to do while maintaining the same level of performance. It freaked me out for months.

What if this is just who I am now, lazier, less ambitious, less motivated?

The performance hit feels like failure, but I think it’s just the normal response to hot swapping one type of fuel for the other.

There is always the pull back to dirty fuels. New fears quickly replace old ones, vying for attention. What if I’m just lazy now? Is a sneaky example of a dirty fuel getting a rebrand.

For me, fully aborting doesn’t seem to be an option. My body now seems to refuse caring about many things that used to matter deeply to me. But if it was, I think I would have.

A few years into this process, I think the real skill is figuring out how to use both. Sometimes fear and anxiety are appropriate motivators, and you really should use them to take action.

There’s a weird art in getting the hang of deciding to use a dirty fuel, take the spike of energy, take action, and then put it down to go back to a default of cleaner motivations.

I haven’t mastered this yet.

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Deciding to let go of the whip you’ve been flogging yourself with forever is terrifying.

Many ambitious and successful people I know whipped themselves into a bloody pulp until exactly the moment where they had enough fuck-you money to stop. That’s a rare circumstance.

Rewiring your engine while the machine is still running feels insane. For me it was a last resort. I simply couldn’t keep going in the same way.

If you’re in the middle of your own clean energy transition, doing it because you have to: you are doing something courageous and hard. I hope you can give yourself some grace.

The fear engine stopping may not feel like good news for a long time. But for me, even with my completely imperfect transition only part-way through, I can say that the fear engine failing to start was really the best thing that could have happened.

The transition was very fucking hard (and ongoing), but the ecology on the other side is way more peaceful.

There’s still fear and stress, but there’s more noticing the birds singing, and time with people who love you.