Читать книгу The Resilient Founder - Mahendra Ramsinghani - Страница 27

When we are in a funk, we keep thinking about suicide. Those thoughts might keep spinning in our heads, and soon some of us even start to research the how-to options. We might identify the various steps, and plan the final exit in great detail.

Tim Ferriss, investor, podcaster, and author of the best-selling book The 4-Hour Workweek, writes about how he had gotten past the “deciding mode” and into “full-on planning mode.” “The world was better off without a loser,” he had concluded.

In his planning mode, Tim Ferriss went to Princeton's Firestone Library. As one of the promising titles on this dark topic of suicide was checked out, Tim put a reserve request for the book. Back in those days, well before the Web, Kindle, and email, the only way to reserve a book was to put your name on a paper log. Once the book was available, the library would then mail you a postcard. Come get this book you were waiting for. We will hold it for two weeks. The postcard, with the promising title of suicide, landed in his mom's hands. Sure, Mom might be wondering about this fantastical development in her son's reading habits.

“Oo – and thank f**king God,” writes Tim. His worried mom called Tim to ask about this book and he blurted out a fast lie – a friend wanted this book for research on depression. Tim had specced out as many as six exit pathways, but that one call from his mom flipped a switch in his head. “I snapped out of my delusion by this one-in-a-million accident,” he writes. A library's postcard may have saved Tim's life.

Entrepreneur Ben Huh writes of his days of despondency. “I spent a week in my room with the lights off and cut off from the world, thinking of the best way to exit this failure. Death was a good option – and it got better by the day.”

Brilliant blazing minds on fire, when faced with severe obstacles and resistance, often get frustrated and impatient. Any goal seems insurmountable. The road seems exhausting, long. Check out what some founders have said.

Founders' Voices

 As we were going to bed, my spouse – a founder – muttered, “Sometimes I think it would be a lot easier if I didn't wake up tomorrow morning …”

 The idea of suicide changed from a comforting option to a constant yet terrifying urge …

 My head was filled with thoughts of suicide – that I was thinking about it in some form or another all the time shook me up … felt like a vice clamped around my head.

To the young who want to die

-Gwendolyn Brooks

Sit down. Inhale. Exhale.

The gun will wait. The lake will wait.

The tall gall in the small seductive vial

will wait will wait:

will wait a week: will wait through April.

You do not have to die this certain day.

Death will abide, will pamper your postponement. I assure you death will wait. Death has

a lot of time. Death can

attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is just down the street; is most obliging neighbor; can meet you any moment.

You need not die today.

Stay here – through pout or pain or peskyness.

Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow.

Graves grow no green that you can use. Remember, green's your color. You are Spring.