Avoiding depression as an indie hacker | dstill.ai shared chat

Shared Chat

Avoiding depression as an indie hacker

Being an indie hacker can come with its own set of challenges, including the risk of experiencing feelings of depression or burnout. However, there are strategies you can employ to reduce the likelihood of experiencing these challenges.

Build a support network: Surround yourself with a community of like-minded individuals who can provide encouragement and support during tough times . Join online communities such as Indie Hackers or MakerLog where you can connect with other indie hackers and share experiences .
Take care of your mental health: Prioritize your well-being by setting boundaries, maintaining work-life balance, and seeking help or professional support if needed . Recognize that it's normal to face challenges and setbacks, and prioritize self-care activities to maintain a healthy mindset .
Find a sense of purpose: Engage in projects that align with your values and personal interests . Having a clear purpose can provide motivation and help combat feelings of boredom or lack of fulfillment .
Avoid placing all your self-worth in your business: While it's natural to be passionate and invested in your venture, it's important to have a healthy separation between your identity and the success of your business . Remember that your self-worth extends beyond your achievements as an entrepreneur and find value in other aspects of your life as well.
Practice stress management: Find techniques that help you relax and unwind, such as mindfulness exercises, regular physical activity, or hobbies outside of work . Recognize your stress thresholds and identify strategies to maintain a healthy balance between stress and performance .

It's also worth noting that trauma survivors often develop resilience skills that can be beneficial in the entrepreneurial space . However, everyone's experiences and backgrounds are unique, and factors like upbringing and personal history can influence individual vulnerabilities .

Remember, seeking professional advice from a mental health expert can provide personalized guidance and support for your specific circumstances.

1

#060 – The Psychological Challenges of Being a Founder with Dr. Sherry Walling of Zen Founder

(someone): Lots of entrepreneurs are, you know, they have to learn to navigate high highs and low lows and a lot of anxiety and stress. And when people are resilient in the aftermath of trauma, that's often one of the skills that they walk away with, which serves them very well in the founder space.

Courtland Allen: So that's interesting, you're saying that the set of skills you develop in order to cope with being a trauma survivor happen to overlap with the set of skills that you need to be a successful and a skilled founder.

(someone): To some extent, yeah, yeah. Of course, there's like exceptions to all of this, but it was this interesting sort of bridge that I took. So my work in post-traumatic stress disorder was largely with people who were professionals in the military. So lots of officers, lots of medics, lots of folks who had important jobs in the military and then experienced either sexual trauma in the course of their deployment or combat-related trauma while they were in the military. And then kind of from that early, early career specialty, I worked a lot with physicians. So another set of professionals who in many cases have just really hard, hard things happen in their jobs. And so it was sort of the stair step to yet another group of folks. And I'm not, I'm not saying that folks who are building businesses are, you know, like, seeing kids die or experiencing assaults, like I'm not making that comparison, but I will say that I've always worked with really intense, intelligent, high functioning, really amazing professionals who are also trying to cope with some significant pain in their lives.

Courtland Allen: It's definitely not black or white. Like you either have trauma or you don't.

2

#060 – The Psychological Challenges of Being a Founder with Dr. Sherry Walling of Zen Founder

(someone): And I think that, you know, it's great in that it's it's fun. It feels good. It feels good to be attached to something that you're making and to put yourself out there in a world in the world. I think it has a lot of benefits. But I also think that when you have limited resources within yourself, and you put all of those resources in one activity, that does become somewhat pretty, like fairly psychologically dangerous. Because of course, our businesses don't always work out well, they do rise and fall. And if we don't have other parts of us that can, you know, that can also be important and meaningful, then we give a little too much power to our business to regulate our sense of worth and well-being as a human. And I love my business, but I need to have a separateness from it in order to be well.

Courtland Allen: Well, let's talk about that because I love that not only are you an expert on these psychological issues, but you also have your own business and you're a founder yourself. So what is Zen Founder exactly and what made you decide to start it?

(someone): Yeah, so Zen Founder is a combination of different things. It began with a podcast that I co-host with my husband, Rob Walling. And we started doing that after So I gave a couple of different conference talks about mental health in entrepreneurs, mental health in founders, and they were really, really well-received. And I gave those talks in response to a couple of high-profile suicides within the founder community.

3

#060 – The Psychological Challenges of Being a Founder with Dr. Sherry Walling of Zen Founder

Courtland Allen: Whereas, as you mentioned earlier, if you're a founder trying to negotiate an exit, or maybe if you have a large team, everything you're doing is very public.

(someone): Yeah, I think early stage folks, there's like a high scrappiness quotient, like just high energy, high excitement, lots of passion, somewhat impervious to disappointment. Hopefully at that phase, if you are able to do some really good long term planning, you know, you have a good plan. But I think I feel like early stage founders are like surviving on, you know, adrenaline and excitement and good ideas. And then as you mature as a founder, that decreases a little bit. You have some wins, hopefully, that keep you in the game, but you also have some discouragements. You have more of a community that supports you, that understands what you're doing, but you also have time to develop some competitors and some frenemies and some people that you have more complicated relationships with as you go on in the founder circles. So I think each sort of developmental phase of being a founder has its unique strengths and its unique weaknesses. And you have different assets at one point in the journey than you do at the other other points in the journey, right? When you're operating early on, you might not have any, you might not have much money to play with, especially if you're bootstrapping. But later on in the journey, maybe you have more funds and you can hire more people. But that, of course, introduces more and just different problems and challenges to your work life.

Courtland Allen: Let's talk about some of the psychological challenges and hurdles that you've had to get over in running your business.

4

#060 – The Psychological Challenges of Being a Founder with Dr. Sherry Walling of Zen Founder

(someone): Of course, this is all very situational and contextually dependent. So kids who have a really hard upbringing do really well if they have a couple of great, important, supportive adults. And in the absence of any supportive adults, those kids, of course, struggle much, much more, both psychologically and physically.

Courtland Allen: So let's say that you're listening to this, and you've had just a golden childhood. Your parents were supportive, they were present, you didn't deal with any of this sort of stress or trauma-inducing events early in your childhood. Do you still need to worry about mental health? Is any of this relevant at all, or are you pretty much good to go? And also, are you at somewhat of a disadvantage compared to founders who've been through these things?

(someone): Sorry, you're not good to go. I mean, so much of the conversation about mental health, at least the way that I like to have it, is about prevention. It's about knowing that, to be honest, any of us have our own vulnerabilities, whether that's in our personality, in the way our body responds to stressors, in our own history of our psychological hurts or, you know, the bumps that we've experienced along the way. Very few people have like an absolutely pristine life experience. And if you have had that kind of golden child experience, in some ways you might be ill-equipped for things that founders experience all the time, like a lot of criticism, like disappointment, like failure. If you haven't had like a scrappiness to your upbringing, there might actually be some skills that leave you vulnerable to mental health problems because you might

5

#060 – The Psychological Challenges of Being a Founder with Dr. Sherry Walling of Zen Founder

Courtland Allen: So is there anything that we as founders can do to be more aware of these underlying emotions that drive our ability to make good decisions?

(someone): I think it's such an important conversation to have, to recognize the kind of deep entanglement between who you are as an individual and who your business is as an entity. For most founders, those things are not easily separated. And that means that as your business rises and falls, as there are highs and lows, so goes your emotional life, so goes your sense of yourself and your identity. And I think the ability to be very carefully self-reflective about the things that you're avoiding, about recognizing the difference between what your business needs and what you need, about sort of counterbalancing that deep relationship that many founders have with their business to try to to try to diversify a little bit, to try to sort of buffer yourself from the roller coaster so that your value as a human being isn't exclusively tied to the bottom line of your business.

Courtland Allen: I know it can be pretty easy to underestimate all this stuff as a first time founder. But in your experience working with more experienced founders, do they struggle just as much or do they naturally get better at dealing with it over time?

(someone): I think it's really hard to get a grasp on that. I mean, I think even really well-established founders have a difficult time really appreciating the depth of that relationship. I usually see people really battling with it when they are approaching an exit. So highly successful founders who are ready to sell their business and, you know, right away into the golden sunshine are realizing how very hard it is to extricate themselves from who they've become in relationship to their business.

6

#243 – Mental Health and Bootstrapping in 2022 with Rob Walling of TinySeed

(someone): and I remember working working working towards it because I live in the future like you do and just thinking to that day when I quit the job and then I got it and I was like this is amazing and it was amazing for like three months and then I was like I'm kind of bored you know like what do I need to do next because I had freedom but I really didn't have a purpose I had a bunch of small apps that were kind of like all had this autopilot traffic from SEO and ads and this and that but like nothing was that interesting to me it was just a paycheck and you know it was a nice paycheck it was a hundred and i don't know 120 to 150 grand um back this is in 2007 so it like ran a long way huge yeah it was great and i was like yeah free but then i was like oh i need i need to find a purpose and that was where i really double started doubling down on talking about this on writing and doing the book and the podcast and all of that came out in about an 18 month period um Because I was like, I want there to be more. And here's the other thing, relationships. there was kind of no one else doing it. Like Joel Spolsky was blogging in the early 2000s, but he started a software company. And then Patrick McKenzie started blogging a couple of years after I did, and he and I ran across each other. And then I'd heard of Basecamp, right? And they had this SaaS that I didn't use. But I'm getting to 2008, 2009, and I'm like, is anyone else thinking about it or doing this whole, you know, the kind of indie hacker, like, Bootstrap startup path.

7

#117 – Becoming Indistractable as a Founder with Nir Eyal, Author of Hooked

(someone): How do you cope with discomfort in a healthier manner? So these techniques include reimagining the trigger itself, reimagining the task and reimagining our temperament and so it's with these techniques you know when we should change the circumstances versus knowing when we should learn methods to cope with those circumstances that's how we master our internal triggers but that has to be the first step because you know as much as we've heard the media these days the technology is melting your brain and it's hijacking your brain it's doing this and that to you. that you know even if you get rid of all the technology as i did i followed you know the thirty day detox plans and minimalism and all the books that tell you to get rid of the technology. It doesn't work it doesn't work because of two reasons one. We need this stuff, for God's sakes. We're hackers, right? Like, we need this technology. We can't just stop using it. Our livelihood depends on it. So it's very easy for some professor to tell us to stop using social media when they don't use it. What about us who need social media for our livelihoods and email and Slack channels? This stuff is how we work. So that's not a practical solution for that reason. And then second, it doesn't work because these temporary approaches are just as bad as a fad diet. So I used to be clinically obese for a good chunk of my life. And I would constantly go on these fad diets of 30 days no junk food, or 30 days this, or 30 days that.

8

#151 – Striking the Right Balance as an Indie Hacker with Sergio Mattei of Makerlog

(someone): I'm confident to say that this period of self-growth couldn't have happened if I had not had the community behind my back. Find a community that really supports you. Find a community that you can be inspired by, feel more productive when you're in it. And yeah, join places like MakerLog. Join places like IndieHackers. Plug to you guys. You guys are awesome. Find people you can really connect with because it really does help. Another thing is find balance. Don't prioritize your work over everything because it seems attractive to spend entire nights coding and getting things done. And it really does give you a nice little dopamine boost to tick something off your checklist. But it's not healthy in the long run, and I learned that the hard way. And a few hours of break weekly or a few days of break weekly could have solved that problem altogether. Prioritize your family, friends or family over hustle. Because at the end of the day, this is kind of something that MakerLite does struggle with too. We see that people are being really productive. We see that they're doing everything. It kind of makes us want to hustle and grind really hard too. think about yourself too. Think about your health. Think about your mental state and think about how to stay healthy in the process. MakerLog is definitely going to focus on that this year, trying to help encourage this whole health first culture. But yeah, I think those are my biggest lessons.

9

#243 – Mental Health and Bootstrapping in 2022 with Rob Walling of TinySeed

(someone): You're going to go through ups and downs. And we had a pretty tough stretch there in the middle of COVID. And I there were a few days where I kind of didn't get out of bed and I've never really done I've never been that messed up before emotionally and I remember being like I really want to keep doing like life and I really want to hang out with my family But like I don't have I just didn't have the motivation to get up I couldn't I couldn't look at my trello board and say I want to do these things. I didn't want to do anything, you know it was, it's, it's tough. And so I haven't traditionally been like, I don't have depression, right? I don't I don't have that's not a thing that plagues my life. In fact, I'm on the other side of the spectrum where I'm a stress anxiety person. That's my whole family tree is all like, alcoholics, drug addicts who are self treating themselves for these anxieties, you know, and my dad, I've talked about this before, but he had he has OCD, he had OCD so bad, he didn't leave his bedroom for seven months when I was a senior in high school. And OCD is an anxiety disorder. So it definitely runs in my family and it's something I've learned to cope with as an adult. But I guess all that to say like this topic of founder mental health in general is it's always resonated with me and I think people never used to talk about it 10 years ago and I think a lot more of us talk about it these days and I think that's probably helpful to normalize it.

10

#243 – Mental Health and Bootstrapping in 2022 with Rob Walling of TinySeed

Courtland Allen: I had a good six months where I was just like what's the point of anything? Why do anything? You know and it was a hard time because it's like the pandemic was very isolating. I had this road trip that I've talked about where I was just like not really seeing anyone and I moved to Seattle and it was like kind of isolating as well and I think for me it really tied into this this topic of purpose because from like probably age 8 to age 34 I've always had this sort of like vision of like, what do I do with my life? And it's like, I'm on this epic adventure, right? I'm trying to build some very big ambitious project and it's usually creative. It usually involves like building a website and designing it and putting code together, which is like this awesome, you know, feedback loop of reward and work and then reward and then work. And I think for the first time since I was eight, I kind of got off it last year and was like, well, what else is there to life, you know? And I sort of found myself spinning and I wasn't sure what the reason was, you know It was like it was all these like other proximate reasons like, you know It's my relationship with my girlfriend going. Okay, or is it like my living situation? It's really easy to like sort of blame the wrong thing But I think at the core I just sort of lost The drive that I had that filled up my days and like made every day feel like I was excited to wake up and do something

11

#060 – The Psychological Challenges of Being a Founder with Dr. Sherry Walling of Zen Founder

Courtland Allen: Let's talk about this path that you took from studying trauma and PTSD and working with patients to working with entrepreneurs. I know that trauma is a very serious issue. I think it's hard to overstate how much of an effect it can have on a person. What, if anything, is the relationship between being an entrepreneur and being a victim of trauma?

(someone): That's a really interesting question. And I got to be honest, I don't think that many people have asked me that before. I think they assume that I've made a shift, but I really haven't made that much of a shift. One of the things that I bump up against a lot in my conversations with entrepreneurs is that I think many, many founders have their own significant stories of early loss or traumatic experiences that in some ways have shaped their path towards entrepreneurship. So many of the founders that I work with are themselves survivors of very difficult early life experiences. And I think the the kind of life or death or the high intensity of those experiences in some ways prepares them to be founders. I will also say that the Capacity to cope with a lot of intensity is something that a lot of trauma survivors have to get comfortable with. And I think that's. really common in the founder space as well. Lots of entrepreneurs are, you know, they have to learn to navigate high highs and low lows and a lot of anxiety and stress. And when people are resilient in the aftermath of trauma, that's often one of the skills that they walk away with, which serves them very well in the founder space.

12

#243 – Mental Health and Bootstrapping in 2022 with Rob Walling of TinySeed

Courtland Allen: It'd be embarrassing, quite frankly. When am I going to tell these people I did nothing? And so I had a lot of late nights on Wednesdays where I would just try to do something to report because I was accountable. And the only time I ever got to feeling like, you know, maybe this is what I shouldn't do was last year when I started feeling a little depressed, a little bit down. Some of the things I was trying to do to grow the site, like weren't working out. And so that sort of feedback loop I've talked about before of, of, you know, positive things happening and encouraging you to try more things in the future and being optimistic. was sort of slowing down and I was like, I'm trying these things and that site's not growing like I want. And so like maybe that this is it, you know, maybe I'm out of ideas and you know, maybe I should rest on my laurels. I've done a good thing and you know, I wasn't working as much. Rosie Sherry, our community manager quit. And so our team was like sort of winding down a little bit and we didn't replace her. And so I had fewer of those mechanisms in place that keep you motivated. And uh, it was the closest I've ever gotten to wanting to quit and exploring like different things.

(someone): Wow. John Howard asks, I always love the conversations of the scrappy early days for indie hackers and bootstrappers, and then throws out a bunch of questions.

13

#060 – The Psychological Challenges of Being a Founder with Dr. Sherry Walling of Zen Founder

(someone): And if you have had that kind of golden child experience, in some ways you might be ill-equipped for things that founders experience all the time, like a lot of criticism, like disappointment, like failure. If you haven't had like a scrappiness to your upbringing, there might actually be some skills that leave you vulnerable to mental health problems because you might be maybe less resilient in the face of adversity.

Courtland Allen: I think one thing that can be hard for founders is when we're making bad decisions based on these sometimes very subtle emotions or psychological issues. A good example is I talked to Saran Yakbarek. She's the founder of Code Newbie. And she had this great insight a few years into her business where she realized that in a lot of the decisions that she was making, she was optimizing for making herself feel better and making herself feel more accomplished, rather than optimizing for making her business more successful. Or another example is if, say, you're a programmer, you might focus on programming tasks because at least you know what you're doing in that realm, and you can feel good about it. And you get these little shots of positivity, and you might end up avoiding all these other important tasks for running your business, like sales and marketing. And if you don't even realize that you're making decisions this way, it can be really hard to fix. So is there anything that we as founders can do to be more aware of these underlying emotions that drive our ability to make good decisions?

(someone): I think it's such an important conversation to have, to recognize the kind of deep entanglement between who you are as an individual and who your business is as an entity.

14

#210 – How to Take On Huge Incumbents as a Solo Founder with Derrick Reimer of SavvyCal

Courtland Allen: I quit my job. Or I'm working for myself. And it's really easy then to just take all the pressure off yourself and be like, I'm going to live a life of freedom and ease. But you probably can't really do that until you've gotten to where you've gotten with Savvy Cal, until you've gotten to the point where you're profitable. It's probably dangerous. to start thinking that way until you've already been successful. And so ironically, choosing to be an indie hacker probably should mean choosing to put a lot of pressure on yourself and to be accountable to other people until you get to that point.

(someone): Yeah, I think that's kind of the maybe a hidden, a hidden secret or quality about indie hacking, right, is like, there's a lot of people who kind of see the know, there's like the pockets of like digital nomads and people who are like, I'm going to do the geo arbitrage game and keep my expenses low and get just enough income so I can I can have this this lifestyle of adventure or whatever, whatever you want to optimize for. But I think also the those of us who kind of get into this game of like, running our own companies, also get tugged by that ambition factor. And before you know it, we actually do wanna do really interesting things and stay challenged, and that challenge kind of just draws you towards more and more ambitious things, which does kind of encroach a little bit on the carefree, easy lifestyle part that kind of entices a lot of people, you know?

15

#060 – The Psychological Challenges of Being a Founder with Dr. Sherry Walling of Zen Founder

(someone): And then you shift to sort of a different external pressure. I think sometimes we develop these structures that are designed to help us stay motivated, but we hold onto them maybe too long. And we don't give ourselves the space to sort of renegotiate, actually, what am I really after right now, right here? How am I growing or am I still just doing the thing that sort of got me to this point? Sort of that what got you here won't get you there phenomenon. So most people function well with a significant amount of stress. There's this old psychological finding called the Yerkes-Dodson principle, which is like your standard bell curve or your normal distribution curve that looks at the relationship between stress and performance. And for tasks that we're pretty proficient in, a medium amount of stress is linked to high performance. I mean, that's the pinnacle of our performance. So too little stress, no stress, no pressure. It's like nobody cares. You're not motivated. Nobody's watching. There's no fire under you to get things done. But your performance quickly drops significantly once that amount of stress crosses over that sort of middle point, and it becomes so much stress that your performance just rapidly declines because the system is flooded with stress, essentially. So you have to be super savvy about being able to read how much stress is the right amount of stress for you, and then making a shift when it's becoming too much or too little.

16

#092 – The Business of Bringing People Together with Derek Andersen and David Spinks of Bevy

(someone): I would end up building one or I'd end up creating something to solve my own problem. So, in the early days of video games, I built like the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 community. It was like the first online community ever built and we had a very active forum, we were running online competitions, we had a whole ecosystem going and I was 13 running it out of my house in my room. And so I've always been really fascinated by how technology can bring people connection. And as someone who struggled early on to find it in the real world and then found it online, that power was always really impressive to me. And so as, as I grew up and new social platforms kept coming out, whether it was like the early days of like dead journal, live journal, or, uh, Myspace and Friendster and all those kinds of platforms. I just became really interested in all these new tools and how they're connecting people. And so, when I went to college, I ended up going for business and started writing a lot about how community was developing online, about how businesses were starting to use these kinds of social platforms to connect with customers. And that ultimately led to me getting first an internship that was focused on kind of digital media and how businesses were going online, and then eventually to my first community manager job. And so, I graduated college, I got this community manager job, I was pumped, I felt like I knew kind of the space in general and just kind of assumed that there were a lot of other people doing this work that I could learn from. And so when I got the job, I kind of started looking around for training programs I could take or other people that I can learn from or communities that I can connect with around community management and building community for business. And there just wasn't anything there.

17

#103 – Finding Success by Working on Things That Matter with Hiten Shah of FYI

(someone): Yeah, even bootstrapping, whatever that means. Anyway, so I think, you know, to your question about self funding and my advice and suggestions, it's kind of like what I was saying earlier, like, you can find a way to spend your time Increasingly spend your time on whatever you're working on. That is your own thing. Because this is really just about you doing your own thing as you're working on something else. Companies are getting way more open to side projects. So that's an example, right? While you're working somewhere else. That's one idea. I'm not saying you do that or you don't do that. I know many folks who work in corporate environments that actually have two laptops. Because they're doing freelancing on the side or something like that. And they don't want to use their company laptop for doing that stuff. That's totally cool. I've seen that with two phones as well. And that's a very specific reason why. And then what I've seen also is that there's folks who have agencies or are doing freelancing and they want to build their own products. And they start with something more lightweight. They start with a digital book or ebook. or a small course or something like that. And they look to market it and sell it and get that muscle of marketing and sales and things like that. And they usually do that in the category of product that they want to build. And then there's lots of engineers out there who are going to just build things.

18

#151 – Striking the Right Balance as an Indie Hacker with Sergio Mattei of Makerlog

(someone): All of that plays into creating a very interesting alternative a niche alternative to mainstream social media or a productive alternative to mainstream social media.

Courtland Allen: One of the things that makes social media so addictive is the fact that we are inherently social creatures who care an immense amount about what other people are doing, especially if those people are people that we look up to or if they're friends or relatives. And that domain is so different than work, especially if you're an indie hacker. Work tends to be pretty solo endeavor. You've got your own to-do lists that no one else is looking at. No one else is even assigning tasks to you, really. It's all internally driven. You've got your own email inbox. You've got probably a solitary environment. You're probably not working from an office. And what you've done with MakerLog is you sort of flipped the script here, you made it so that all of these tasks are social. So I'm not just working on my tasks by myself, but I'm showing them to other people. I get to see other people's behind the scenes tasks, instead of just seeing, you know, whatever marketing message they're putting out on Twitter, I get to see, you know, what actually went into that product launch, what were they doing in the days leading up to it, etc. And I think it's just a great perspective to have to see what others are working on.

19

#051 – Finding Your Way as a Founder with Rand Fishkin of Moz and SparkToro

(someone): Basically, I wrote a blog post saying, this thing is now available. And that was it. That was all the marketing we did. But because that blog post went through RSS and email at the time, this is sort of pre-heavy social media days, it was read by thousands of people, a few thousand people, maybe 2,000 or 3,000 people who needed tools just like we did. And so essentially, by solving our own pain point and being in that world, we had built this community and they turned out to be right customers for us. And to be honest, Corland, I'm kind of doing that again, right? My hope with SparkToro, with this new business is to, over the next six to 12 months, as my co-founder and I build out the product and the technology underlying it and do a lot of validation, I hope to build a community of thousands of folks who come to SparkToro, mostly for content and to learn about marketing and those kinds of things. And then see, oh, they have this product. This is the problem they're trying to solve. If I'm interested in that, I can sign up to get notified when it comes out. And by building that audience-first, product-second approach, which I think is actually pretty unusual, unfortunately, in the classic startup world. I think probably more common in the indie hackers world. Oh, definitely. Yeah, I think I think that can be a great path to quick traction.

Courtland Allen: One of the problems that a lot of indie hackers in particular face is that they have pretty limited resources. They don't have funding.

20

#243 – Mental Health and Bootstrapping in 2022 with Rob Walling of TinySeed

Courtland Allen: uggling to do things like everybody's going through different shit, you know I had so many like I had a ridiculously good leave it to beaver childhood, you know, like I have zero trauma I like zero like real true lasting hardships that I really had to push through that like left a scar on me And so like I was like freed in my 20s to just go tackle challenges without any mental health issues and stuff like that but other people are like struggling to get out of bed, you know, they're struggling to deal with like Terrible things that have happened to them and they're trying to take on these big challenges And I think that like it's really easy to underestimate that and if you're going through that kind of stuff If you were just sort of ignoring it like I think you're doing yourself a disservice At times in my life.

(someone): I have ignored it for too long. The other thing I ignored was physical issues We're talking about mental health but like I had really bad shoulder and back pain neck pain because we all hunch over our desks and I had it for years and it was kind of debilitating it was to the point where I was under constant pain and Why the fuck didn't I do something about it? I remember saying, like, I don't have the time. And then I went to a chiropractor and a massage therapist, and it, like, didn't fix it quick enough. And I was like, I just don't have time to carve out two hours a week to do this. So I didn't do it. And it wasn't until we moved to Minneapolis, I'd sold the company, I went to three different massage folks, and I found a dude who's really good. And he you know, integrates all these different things.

21

#243 – Mental Health and Bootstrapping in 2022 with Rob Walling of TinySeed

(someone): and I remember working working working towards it because I live in the future like you do and just thinking to that day when I quit the job and then I got it and I was like this is amazing and it was amazing for like three months and then I was like I'm kind of bored you know like what do I need to do next because I had freedom but I really didn't have a purpose I had a bunch of small apps that were kind of like all had this autopilot traffic from SEO and ads and this and that but like nothing was that interesting to me it was just a paycheck and you know it was a nice paycheck it was a hundred and i don't know 120 to 150 grand um back this is in 2007 so it like ran a long way huge yeah it was great and i was like yeah free but then i was like oh i need i need to find a purpose and that was where i really double started doubling down on talking about this on writing and doing the book and the podcast and all of that came out in about an 18 month period um Because I was like, I want there to be more. And here's the other thing, relationships. there was kind of no one else doing it. Like Joel Spolsky was blogging in the early 2000s, but he started a software company. And then Patrick McKenzie started blogging a couple of years after I did, and he and I ran across each other. And then I'd heard of Basecamp, right? And they had this SaaS that I didn't use. But I'm getting to 2008, 2009, and I'm like, is anyone else thinking about it or doing this whole, you know, the kind of indie hacker, like, Bootstrap startup path.