Did we read the same article? I didn't interpret it as a pity-party at all. I haven't been a CEO, but I have been in upper management, and that has been stressful enough for me to know that being a CEO is the last thing I could do.
I just thought this post was an honest discussion of one person's emotions, and I didn't feel that it was too strong one way on the positives or the negatives. If anything I found it helpful putting into context some of my own emotions that I have in leadership positions.
Maybe my reading was too coloured by my own emotions and experiences with the job, and I apologize if so, but continuing my rant I have a real problem with anyone who takes very optional and voluntary hardships on and complains they're hard. Especially when the problems he openly talks about are so in his control. Email, really? Tell me about the times your own board tried to oust you or the funerals you missed for a biz dev meeting that went nowhere and maybe I'll take you seriosly.
It makes me uneccessarily mad to read about sacrifice in privilege. CEOs sometimes want to quit the job? How about grunts on deployment? My paternal grandfather was a military man - wartime general. Never heard him complain but did hear a proud story of when he was a platoon commander in the jungle. If his platoon happened on a mine field he'd stand besides the poor sod tasked with defusing it until the job was done. That's leading. That's grit.
Let's have conversations about mental health and sacrifices, but let's not pretend san francisco tech entrepreneurs leading large successful companies are in a uniquely hard place in life.
If you're leading a company of young, mainly unattached folks and don't have other companies depending on your product, then yes, it's more like a gold rush where you all prosper together and the downside of flying the company into a mountain is 'oh, well, we tried and we learned, let's move on to the next thing.'
It's a different matter if your company is staffed by family breadwinners and you have customers that would have serious deletierious consequences if your firm failed. You don't even need to fail, just go through a rough patch and lay off some the workers you hired and trained, or, fail to deliver a project that negatively affects a customer. These are nerve-wracking for CEOs that aren't made of the stuff that can lead firmly through these situations.
Perhaps the better notion is that startup CEOs that really do react poorly to the 'hard stuff' need a plan to move the burdensome work to a 'professional CEO' and step into Chairman/CTO, or somesuch. Keep the fun, keep the equity, offload the hard stuff.
The fear of letting people down can be crippling. To be brutally honest, there is a type of CEO who simply doesn't feel that as deeply as some people, and they tend to do well in the job, especially when times are good.
In my experience, that type of person is not the same type of person who comes up with an idea and creates something out of nothing. You need some real empathy to find product-market fit; you have to actually care about users and early adopters and by extension investors and employees. But that profile I don't think works at a big company, there is a totally different dynamic.
Hence the stereotype of effective CEOs being sociopaths: their empathy is for the money, not anything--or anyone-- else. They can make a lot of decisions that we would consider difficult, in a completely dispassionate manner, and that's how and why they become good for the job.
I guess what triggers me is the stressors they describe as responsible for those emotions. To me they are meaningless compared to things that really should cause anxiety in a CEO: am I making payroll this month if deal X falls through? Can I land in jail if thing Y turns out to be illegal instead of a harmless hustle? If I fizzle is my professional life over?
The Hard Thing About Hard Things made the same points as the author in much more poignant ways to me, when I read it. No current or future CEO should stress about volume of email or thoughts of another career as a bartender in a tropical island - stress about real problems instead.
I hear you and often I have a similar reaction—why does this person feel X when Y happens because I feel Z when Y happens, so it makes no sense for them to feel X.
So for you, those stressors may seem meaningless. However, to that person, those stressors may feel devastating. Likewise, some things that deeply impact you may seem trivial to them.
I, like you, would imagine that the "am I making payroll this month" would be a larger stressor on a CEO (I've never been one so I haven't been in that situation) than the volume of email I'd receive, and yet I can also imagine the payroll stress is relatively infrequent where the email stress may be a nagging drag, bringing with it incessant uncertainty of 1) whether what I say in an email will be posted to Twitter or used against me in 10 years, 2) news that rockets the company or tanks it, or even 3) an email that notifies me I won't make payroll this month.
I dunno. I say this to you as much as to myself to remind me that while we might all feel very similar emotions, sometimes we attribute very different causes to those emotions.
*edit: and remembering this and actually accepting that other people have different emotional responses to the same stimuli than I do is one of the things that confuses and frustrates me the most.
> Tell me about the times your own board tried to oust you or the funerals you missed for a biz dev meeting that went nowhere and maybe I'll take you seriosly.
This comes across as gatekeeping and I can only wonder what has riled you up so much about the author's experience to go on this kind of attack.
I can't speak to being a CEO - I'm just a middle manager - but a lot of this, especially the loneliness, resonated with me.
Did I choose management? Yes. Do I have a choice to stop? Also, yes. Do I make enough money either way to have a nice apartment and no real material concerns? That too.
But I'm definitely stressed and lonely. I'm really not sure if this is what's best for my mental health. From the article him and I aren't the only ones with that feeling. My boss, too, has talked about feeling exhausted; when we have events for leads, it feels like we're even more burned out than the rank-and-file.
Lonely is easy to explain. The more you move up, the fewer peers you have. The fewer people you have to look up to and emulate. The more "on your own" you are, expected to operate independently and direct more folks. There's less of a playbook. More acting by intuition. More people looking up at, depending on, and often resenting you. Your relationships with communities of coworkers changes. When they're upset, rather than joining in on the griping and feeling camaraderie you feel either vaguely responsible or unaware of what's really been going on. Whatever it is not just a thing to bitch and moan about - you're responsible.
The stress comes from the same place - feeling a sense of responsibility for all the people in your org, for the company, all of it. It's a much bigger scope than your IC responsibility. It's hard to let go of, to accept that you might not pick the right 2 or 3 of 100 things to focus on, and when you do, there are real consequences for real people. With that kind of scope you're making a lot more mistakes just because there's so much more surface area. Those mistakes matter, too! Hire the wrong person, ignore a team that needs your attention? These are big painful mistakes. People might quit, their careers might languish, an asshole might make people miserable, customers might have a bad day(/month/quarter/etc), etc.
You have to accept a lot of failure in this very difficult job with a huge scope and no real rules or guidance, but that's hard when you're a competitive, success-oriented person.
"But you can quit!" is a valid argument. One the article addresses - it says it takes years to set up for a CEO. For me, it's shorter, but I still feel like it's something that you can't just hire an eager replacement for - for a bunch of reasons. Pick the wrong person, and again, lots of consequences to people you care about.
Somebody in leadership did quit without notice recently - and I saw all their reports bump up to their lead, who was already way stretched thin. Those people won't have real support for a long time. Their new lead is really stretching himself very thin. I hope the person who quit is able to find peace in it (genuinely, I don't think they wouldn't have done it if they felt there were alternatives). But I know I wouldn't be able to.
Sometimes I wonder if there would be an equivalent to a Dwarf Fortress tantrum spiral. Somebody quits, their team flows up, that person then snaps, etc, until half the company is reporting to a handful of people. (and imagine how responsible the CEO would feel if that happens?)
I just thought this post was an honest discussion of one person's emotions, and I didn't feel that it was too strong one way on the positives or the negatives. If anything I found it helpful putting into context some of my own emotions that I have in leadership positions.