Erik Severinghaus: Why Pretending to Know It All Can Kill Your Startup

“This is totally counterintuitive to what everybody says to do on Twitter, and to what most of these well-known entrepreneurial influencers tell you to do,” says Erik Severinghaus, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Bloomfilter. That kind of toxic, hustle culture advice, the kind that tells you to “do more, and go faster,” at the expense of your mental, physical and emotional well-being is like “psychological meth” he says. Stories about a handful of unicorn entrepreneurs tend to leave out the many variables of success, causing the vast majority of us to internalize messages of failure.

Instead, Erik offers hard-earned advice gleaned from his successes as well as failures. He talks to host Alex Raymond about the danger zone new entrepreneurs fall into when they experience quick success, the pitfalls of overconfidence, and the Dunning Kruger effect. An avid mountaineer, the literal life-saving lessons he learned while climbing Mt. Everest proved equally beneficial to business. He compiled them in his book “Scale Your Everest,” and he shares some of them here today.

On this episode of The Conscious Entrepreneur he’ll explain the four important elements to any entrepreneurial—and any human—journey—and how to learn to forgive yourself from past mistakes.

Quotes

“I felt like I needed to figure out how to distill all this stuff into something that was relevant to entrepreneurship. That was juxtaposed with my experience climbing Mt. Everest, where I realized that what got me to the top of the mountain, and so many of the lessons that my guides were telling me, really was very different than what I heard in the hustle culture of entrepreneurship.” (16:37 | Erik Severinghaus)
“I realized that the water that we’re swimming in as entrepreneurs is so toxic, from the perspective of the advice that we get, from ‘Hustle harder,’ to ‘Who cares if your friends and family hate you?’ ‘The only path to enlightenment effectively is material success and adding an extra zero to your bank account.’” (17:35 | Erik Severinghaus)
“If I took the same approach to entrepreneurship that I took to climbing the mountain, my odds of success would be lower and my odds of physical death would be much higher. And what I realized is if I took the mountaineering approach to entrepreneurship, then the odds of success go up and the odds of personal success, well-being [go up].” (19:48 | Erik Severinghaus)
“It’s not about working hard, necessarily, it’s about making sure that expenditure of energy is efficient in terms of what I’m trying to achieve. I don’t get any special points for staying at the office until two a.m.” (33:11 | Erik Severinghaus)

Links

Connect with Erik Severinghaus:

Website: https://www.severinghaus.com/