Sicko mode

Apollo gave me 75 tickets to ApolloNext. I'm handing all 75 to BDE readers.

ApolloNext is Apollo's GTM event — September 30th at the  SFJAZZ Center in San Francisco. One room, one day, and all the operators actually running modern go-to-market will be there.

Who's on stage:

And because you read BDE, you'll also get an invite to the invite-only VIP Founders Lunch. You'll meet Matt and Howie along with leaders from Sequoia, Bain, Tribe Capital, Anthropic, and OpenAI. 

I only have 75 tickets to give — claim yours while it lasts. If you want to improve your GTM, it's a no brainer. 

I'm about to go sicko mode. What the fuck does that even mean? I don't know, but it sounds provocative.

No, I'm actually just going to gaslight myself into having the best 100 days of my life. And get into the best shape of my life while I'm at it.

Why? Because I'm traveling more in the next few months than I ever have…and I hate travel. Flying six hours cross country with shitty WiFi, two hours in traffic, sleeping in a tiny hotel room, then getting up early for a full day of meetings and events. Then doing it again. Day after day.

Two weeks ago I was in New York for the Status Summit (see dope pic of me above). I'm back in New York this week for a bunch of meetings and events.

I'll be back again in two weeks for Advertising Week (in retrospect I should have just rented an apartment here for the fall). Then a week in Mexico City to work IRL with my cofounders. Then Lisbon for Web Summit, Madrid, and London for meetings before heading back to LA for Thanksgiving.

I don't say any of that to flex — this is my hell. Or at least it was, until I decided to gaslight myself into being positive.

It was very hard to write that last sentence while sitting in two hours of traffic leaving JFK, about to miss the workout class I booked 🙃. New me: what a beautiful opportunity to write my newsletter in an Uber.

I used to write off mindset as woo-woo hippie shit that wasn't based in reality. But the more time I've spent with successful people, the more I've seen the same habits: meditation, journaling, affirmations.

Tobi Lütke, co-founder and CEO of Shopify, went deep on this with David Senra. He framed it as engineering, not spirituality.

His model: the brain is a retrospective narrative alignment mechanism, constantly reconciling your history to whatever version of yourself feels most true.

He was terrified of public speaking, so he sat down for ten minutes a day for a week and wrote that he loved it. A week later it worked. He insists it isn't placebo — you're actually rewriting the thing your brain reconciles against.

"I love traveling and sitting in traffic."
"I love traveling and sitting in traffic."
"I love traveling and sitting in traffic."

I just finished the recent episode of My First Million with Joe Hudson, an executive coach who works with business leaders like Sam Altman and Mark Pincus. The entire episode is worth a listen, but he specifically gets into what a positive affirmation is doing under the hood: changing your identity. You're declaring you're no longer this person, you're that person… and your brain goes to work to close the gap.

He goes a layer deeper on visualization. If you want to be comfortable with the identity shift, you also have to visualize the outcomes you're afraid of (vividly enough to feel them) so they stop having a grip on you.

*I'm currently visualizing myself jet-lagged, frantically trying to connect to Delta's broken WiFi, while my team is blocked on something and some customer is yelling at me.

To round out the trifecta, let me drop some knowledge from a book I'm currently reading called The Upside of Stress (talk about gaslighting). In a nutshell: stress itself isn't the problem, your belief about stress is. People who view stress as harmful have worse health outcomes than people under equal stress who view it as useful.

Researchers tracked 28,753 US adults for nine years, asking two questions: how much stress did you have last year, and how much effect did that stress have on your health. People with high stress who said it was wrecking them had a 43% higher risk of dying. People with equally high stress who didn't think it was hurting them had the lowest death risk in the study… lower even than people reporting almost no stress at all.

How wild is that? By simply not believing that stress was hurting them, it legitimately became less detrimental (and less deadly).

"I love stress and all of its benefits."
"I love stress and all of its benefits."
"I love stress and all of its benefits."

I've written extensively about my mental health journey as a founder. My ideal week is super regimented so I can show up as the best version of myself: early wakeup, meditate, gym, deep work, reading, eight hours of sleep, repeat. My ideal weekend is filled with activities that give me energy: hot yoga, surfing, breathwork, and quality time with friends.

So naturally, my reaction to traveling every week this fall was resistance. It's the antithesis of the lifestyle I built to keep me sane and productive.

But there's no upside for me to complain. I initially tried to say no to all of these commitments. The opportunity for each was too good:

It's literally my job to do everything possible to help us succeed, and if that means traveling every week then so be it. I want to take advantage of every opportunity I can.

And despite my (previous) disdain for travel, I should be able to view these circumstances more positively.

You can literally choose your attitude. I'm refusing to choose between travel and health — I'm going to do both. Workouts twice a day, runs, sauna, meditation, everything. If that means meditating at LAX and doing pushups in my hotel room in Lisbon, fine. I refuse to let my physical or mental health suffer.

On Friday I caught up with one of my homies who said: what you're doing isn't sustainable, but it's also not going to last forever, so enjoy it while you have it.

And he's right. One day I'll reminisce about my days flying in and out of cities, hitting revenue milestones with the team, giving keynotes at international conferences, and building something meaningful with people I deeply love and care about.

From that perspective, I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I'm living my dream and having a great time doing it.

This newsletter really is just a reminder to myself. A reminder to enjoy the journey. It's one of the easiest, most cliché pieces of startup advice, and one I personally find almost impossible to follow.

If you're reading this, maybe it can be a reminder for you too. Whether you're a founder, or a student, or a mother, or a friend — nothing lasts forever, so we should all enjoy it (whatever it is) while it's here.

As for me, I might have 55,000 miles of travel ahead of me but I'm about to get in the best shape of my life. beehiiv is about to have our best quarter ever, and I'm about to lock in to a degenerate degree.

If you're reading this thinking that I've totally lost my mind — you're probably right. But just wait til you see me in a few months.

If you enjoyed this post or know someone who may find it useful, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe: mail.bigdeskenergy.com/p/sicko-mode

My office in 2036, still degenerately locked in, probably writing a newsletter about being locked in.

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