Staying in balance

This is how people explain the experience of entrepreneurship: with the Dunning-Kruger Effect. You might be familiar with this picture. We have this confidence bias where we start off very confident we’re able to do something, while imagining what we have to do. We’re in Peak of Mount Stupid. When we start doing the thing and are faced with reality, we realize it’s much harder than we initially thought. Down we go into the Valley of Despair. This is where most people quite. They look at that Slope of Enlightenment and they feel it’s too much for them. So they submit to their emotions and call it quits. But for someone like me, who vowed to never give it on his dreams, the size of the mountain does not matter. What no one told me is that the Slope of Enlightenment isn’t, in fact, a smooth line. It's a sloped sinusoidal with ups and down, going up! The past couple of weeks have been extremely exciting. Every single day I have faced those kinds of challenges where I have no idea how to solve a particular problem. Every day has been a rollercoaster of “Oh shit, I have no idea what I’m doing” to “Oh, this actually might work” to “Look at that! I’ve made it!”. What this means I’d like to spell out some insights I’ve had during this process. The first, and perhaps most important is this: even thought I’ve never worked as hard as I have this year, I haven’t felt much stress. In fact, I’ve been energized, excited, and the happiest I have ever been in my life. While pushing myself to my limits. So stress is not what I thought it was. Stress does not come from pressure. Stress comes from ignoring things which should'nt be ignored. The other insight is about what is at the limit of my capacity. What kind of person we become at that limit. For context, I am, generally, fairly disciplined. My friends often say I’m the most disciplined person they know. When I’m not pushing myself to the limit, I do pretty much everything that’s important to me, right: I go to bed early, I sleep well, wake up early, meditate, reflect and journal, workout, work until 18h00 and then spend time with my partner, family and friends, do chores (clean the house, put clothes to wash, go grocery shopping, etc), and go on adventures. Not pushing myself to my limit is a pretty comfortable and happy place to be. But I don’t seek mere happiness. I seek to realize - in both senses of the word: to understand and to make real - myself. So pushing myself to my limits and growing from that experience goes from making me happy to making me extremely excited, vibrant, and determined about life, and the role model I want to be for the people around me, specially my future kids. The insight I’ve had is that at the edge of my capacity, I tend to be less mindful and drop important things. This is normal: if my brain’s capacity is at its peak, not much brain compute is left to think about other things. So workouts, going to bed early, eating healthy, and spending time with family and friends gets dropped in exchange for hard work late into the night. The consequence of this is that my happiness suffers and I feel more disconnected. A thought that often goes thought my mind is this: “André, if you drop the important stuff, life becomes meaningless, no matter how hard you work. Keep your shit together”. 😂 I’m not yet sure how to solve this, but acknowledging it is a huge first step. I’ll ask my friends for advice on this ♥️ And now I'm asking for your too 🙌