Blizzards, Bank Accounts, and Broken Toes
5-minute read covering Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs as Applied to the Life of a Founder
👋🏼 I’m Alek, a repeat founder with a successful exit. Every week, I share my thoughts on navigating career and company-building challenges in 5-minute reads. My posts typically focus on building resilience and applying a practical, data-driven mindset to your ambitions.
You Need to be at the Top of the Pyramid
It’s amazing how quickly you can lose your drive to succeed. Over the past two years of building my company, most of the time, I’ve had the drive to push through the uncertainties of a founder’s life. But there were a handful of days where I struggled to find that drive. I've struggled to maintain my motivation whenever my “baser needs,” according to Maslow’s hierarchy (depicted below), aren’t fulfilled. Today, I’ll share stories about my experience tumbling down the pyramid and how I climbed back up.
Blizzards
In early 2023, my wife and I lived in a redwood forest in the San Francisco Bay Area.
It was an awesome place to live; we love the outdoors and I generally dislike being around other people. But in early 2023, we woke up in the night to the loudest thunder we’d ever heard. We looked out our bedroom window to discover it wasn’t thunder; we were hearing untested redwood trees crumbling under the weight of falling snow. We were getting hit by a massive snow storm… unusual for California.
We lived in the middle of hundreds of these redwood trees. On most days, we appreciated their natural beauty. On this night, we respected (and feared) their destructive capability. At any point a tree could decide, “I’ve had enough of this snow” and fallen on our house. Redwoods are huge. If a tree fell on our house at the wrong angle, we’d be toast. That night, my fiancé, dog, and I went down to the garage to sleep in the car. Sleeping in a metal box with wheels in the basement felt like the right decision at the time.
Fortunately, we woke up the next morning unscathed.1 We took inventory of the house. Some trees had fallen in the yard and others had precariously leaned in our direction, but we were through the worst of it. Now to deal with the aftermath… we trudged through feet of snow on our morning dog walk and got the lay of the land. Trees rested on power lines. A neighbor had accidentally driven their car off the road in the night. A power pole had literally split in two, the top half suspended over the road supported by the still-intact cables.
We checked the electricity and internet outage map. Pretty much everywhere was red so we knew it would be a while before they got to us. Our landlord had a generator on the property and we had enough gas to power the house for 24 hours. We didn’t know when it would be safe to drive to town and get more gas.
Literally over night, we’d fallen to the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid. Time to focus on building my company..? Not a chance. We set a schedule for when we’d run the generator, optimizing for keeping our food from spoiling. Ultimately, we survived. After a few days, we were able to get the car down to town to acquire more food and generator fuel. Our electricity and internet didn’t come back online for about three weeks, but we made due by running the generator, tethering to our phones, and frequenting coffee shops.
Bank Accounts
In “The Dark Side of the Fo—under's Life: Uncertainty,” I shared my experiences dealing with uncertain paychecks.
There have been several times over the last two years when I’ve stared at the possibility of a $0 paycheck or watched my bank account swiftly flow down the drain.
Whenever I’ve dealt with this financial uncertainty, I’ve doubted myself. At times like this, I’ve struggled to focus on just building my company. I’ve explored job postings and updated my resume. Fortunately, the strategies I outlined in “The Dark Side of the Fo—under's Life: Uncertainty” have helped to carry me through.
Broken Toes
Earlier this year, I’ve took a less dramatic trip to the bottom the pyramid. It was January 2024, and I was gearing up to watch a football game. I hadn’t watched much football over the last few years, so I was excited to watch my first game in a while. I plopped down on the couch and flipped on the game. I watched the kickoff and realized my rookie mistake, “You know what would go great with a football game… a bowl of chips!” I started the not-so-long walk from the couch to the kitchen and retrieved the chips. I quickly strode into the family room to make sure I didn’t miss anything and **whack** my right foot slammed into an ottoman. You’d think I’d have been more careful after the meatball incident of 2014!
The next day I limped around the house and, for whatever reason, grabbed my toe with two fingers to move it around and see what hurt. It was either broken or fractured. I maintained a limp for a couple of weeks.
As I limped through life, my motivation to work on hard problems also bottomed out. I did what was required for my existing clients, but I struggled to work on the problems with questionable, longer-term payoffs.
Lessons Learned and Moving Forward
How would you motivate yourself to build a company when you’re concerned about food, shelter, or your physical well-being? In my experience, you can’t. And, that’s OK.
Whether it’s an act of mother nature or your own idiocy, we all end up in situations where our base needs are unfulfilled. In these moments, it’s hard to motivate yourself to solve hard problems. The best thing you can do is stay the course. Understand why you feel the way you do (e.g., “I broke my toe”). And, if it’s a temporary state-change, don’t give up on your long-term goals based on solely that feeling.
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By sharing my experiences, I hope to provide insight and advice to entrepreneurs facing similar hurdles. Please leave a comment or email me with any questions.
Mostly… our dog developed a fear of thunderstorms that we’re still working on a year and a half later.