Am I the type of person who wants to start a company?

How I apply my identity to improve decision-making and motivation through the hard moments of running your own company.

Photo by Mak on Unsplash

👋🏽 Welcome to A Founder's Life for Me! I’m Alek, and I’ll share my experiences building tech companies to provide you with practical recommendations on how to build your own thing.

Subscribe to get free access to all past and future posts.

Putting the cart before the horse

When I sat down to write this, I thought the right place to start would be “starting a company.” I was wrong. After attempting several openers, I realized the best place to start is “Deciding to start a company.”

Before you start anything, you have to want to do it. This sounds obvious, but being really thoughtful about this decision can help you reach better outcomes. You will put more effort into the small things when others won’t. You will persevere when things get hard.

The wrong way to decide

I wasn’t firm enough in my decision to start my first company. I decided to start it in 2017, I had moved to San Francisco to see about a girl¹, and I thought…

“I live in San Francisco; I should have a fun, techy side project to work on!”

Decision made! Woo! Let’s get building! And then, over the course of the next several months, I thought…

“I don’t really know how to code… I have a full-time job… I’m just starting a relationship… I just moved across the entire country…”

There were so many big reasons why my initial decision to work on a “fun, techy side project” wasn’t the “right” thing for me to do then. When I hit those existential roadblocks, they hit me hard. Especially the “I don’t really know how to code” roadblock... There’s nothing more demoralizing than sitting down and staring at a problem that you feel utterly ill-equipped to solve. There were many days where, after a ten-hour day working my full-time job, I’d get home and spend four hours coding. And then, at the end of the day, things were often worse than when I had started.

In those hard moments, my motivation for starting my first company failed me. “I live in San Francisco; I should have a fun, techy side project to work on!” wasn’t a strong enough driving force to carry me through the hard times. The results are fairly predictable. I quit. When things got hard, I put the project down. I decided, “I can’t do this,” or I wondered, “Why have I been sitting here making negative progress coding for the last four hours? I could have been hanging out with my friends.” I hadn’t thought about why I had started, so I wasn’t standing on solid ground.

If I could return to one of those low moments and ask Past Alek: “Why are you working on this?” He’d probably say something like, “I want to make a lot of money.” In response, I’d say, “That’s not a strong enough reason to carry you through these hard times. Don’t think about what you want, but the type of person you want to be.”²

The right way to decide

The stronger decision focuses on your identity, not what you want. My new structure for making decisions focuses on my own identity:

“I am the type of person who…” or “I am not the type of person who…”

It’s much easier to find deeper motivation when you express things this way. In Atomic Habits by James Clear, he discusses the power of applying identity to influence habit creation and elimination. Beyond habits, I’ve used an expanded version of this “applied identity” framework to support my decision-making in both day-to-day and existential decisions.

Day-to-Day Decision Application #1

Let’s first apply identity in a day-to-day setting. In the story of my first company, I quit and put the project down.

In those moments, I said, “I want to… put this project down because it’s hard.”

I wouldn’t have said, “I want to be the type of person who… puts this project down because it’s hard.”

The identity-based frame of reference immediately motivates me because it associates my identity with the decisions I’m making at that point in time.

Day-to-Day Decision Application #2

A very common application of this in my day-to-day is writing emails. When answering a question over email, I usually start with the “quick version” of the response. Then, if I have the motivation, I go into more detail… reviewing the email, adding screenshots, and ensuring I’m being thorough in my explanation. At the moment, I want to do the “quick version,” but I want to be the type of person who sends the “thorough version.”

You may want to be the type of person who sends the “quick version” of the email or a different type of email entirely. This framework can be applied when writing an email, working on an analysis, writing code, or delivering something to a client. Your answer won’t be the same every time. In the email example, my answer changes depending on many factors. Sometimes “I want to be the type of person who quickly unblocks his teammates,” and sending the quick version of the email is warranted. Whatever the decision, this framework helps me end the day happier with my decisions because they align with the type of person I want to be.

Existential Decision Application

There are a lot of existential dilemmas that you face when building a company. For me, examples of these include:

1. Spending the majority of my time on activities that I don’t inherently enjoy

2. Making significantly less money than I could as a salaried employee

3. Experiencing self-doubt (i.e., “someone else can do this better than I can”)

Now, I respond to these existential dilemmas with the reason I started my most recent company. And, using this deeper level of motivation carries me through the hard times with more resilience than I’ve ever had before:

“I am the type of person who forges his own path.”

Honestly, this isn’t something I had thought of before this year. I’m 31 years old, and my understanding of my identity is still evolving. That said, the last year has taught me that the more of my identity I can understand and apply, the more resilient I’ll be to the existential dilemmas I encounter (both in business and life).

I would cringe at myself for giving the next step to “think about the person you want to be.” One facet of my identity is that I am the type of person who is practical. Staying true to my identity, here’s my suggestion: The next time you hit an existential dilemma, consider what part of your identity supports your decision. I won’t ask you to write it down… although an “Identity Journal” does sound cool. The more you understand these parts of your identity, the better prepared you’ll be for tackling existential dilemmas in the future.

Conclusion

Before you start anything, *you* have to want to do it. In my experience, the best way to do this is by applying your identity by completing the sentence “I want to be the type of person who…”

I’ll leave you with these two recommendations:

Recommendation #1: Try the applied identity framework to a day-to-day decision. Examples in a work setting might include: writing an email, working on an analysis, writing code, or delivering something to a client.

Recommendation #2: Try the applied identity framework to your next existential dilemma by considering your decision and the part of your identity that supports it.

Whether you’re considering starting your own company or grabbing a second serving of dessert, this framework can help you better understand who you are, be more quick & confident in your decisions, and be happier because they align with your identity.

If you enjoyed this, please let me know by subscribing through the link below.

1. The girl is now my wife! 😊

2. If you read this and thought of the scene in Lion King where Simba looks to the stars and Mufasa gives him crucial life advice, then that makes two of us.