Achievement-oriented people are given to depression both when they fail and when they succeed. If your identity is tied up in your work, then you feel bad about yourself when work isn't going well. That's obvious, and that's the message of this blog post. The implicit message is that you're depressed because you're not succeeding, so get your shit together and succeed and be happy like everyone else.
But then if you do succeed, you start to wonder, why did I just spend my youth in this masochistic, narcissistic path, and why the fuck am I not as happy as I was expecting, and is this really all there is in life. This is a classic "achiever in crisis." The problem is that you realize all along you've been doing things that OTHER people wanted -- that is, you've been doing things that make you valuable in society -- perfect summed up in the raison d'etre du jour, "making the world a better place." And nobody stopped you, because who can argue with making the world a better place? (Or being a doctor, or whatever.) But upon reflection, you quickly realize that this was in many ways easier than asking yourself what YOU wanted out of life. I.e. you've pushed aside your innate feelings and desires, whatever they may have been, and replaced them with the external motivation of achievement, under the rationale that you'd be able to "figure it out" after you had "made it".
Unfortunately achievers aren't really sure what they want "deep down" because achievement is inherently defined by society, and then after they've "made it" they freak out because they start to wonder if there even is a "deep down" or if they're just a highly educated donkey chasing a carrot.
If you talk to e.g. people who've gone through rigorous Ph.D. programs, you'll find a number of them were severely depressed after their defense. It was just kind of a let-down after such a long buildup, and then they started to wonder why they invested the entirety of their twenties into it and question whether that's really what they wanted their life to be. At least before the defense they could have something look forward to, and the various requirements provided a source of manic energy to propel the achiever forward.
Anyway I don't think the problem here is "not enough success," and I don't think the solution is having more coffee meetings. Founders need to take a hard look in the mirror and ask themselves why they're doing what they're doing and whether their depression is truly a function of their free cash flow or if there's a deeper dissonance between the founder's feelings and the expectations of society, i.e. the heroic mythology of the founder that Silicon Valley has been inculcating in susceptible teenagers for the last 20 years.
Just my 2c. I am not a founder just an observer and aspiring societal psychiatrist. If you want to learn more I highly recommend "The Wisdom of the Enneagram":
>Founders need to take a hard look in the mirror and ask themselves why they're doing what they're doing
I'm happy. The happiest I've ever been, in fact. I just graduated after a decade of fucking around and I have a job that I enjoy and that pays me fairly well. Tomorrow, I'm going to buy myself a motorcycle. I like my friends. Life is good.
I've never been able to look in a mirror and honestly answer that question. Of all of the things I've ever felt insecure about, "why are you making the choices you are" tops the list. The biggest mental block I've ever experienced is trying to answer that question, and even as I write honestly about my struggles to do so I'm still not able to face it.
The only explanation I've ever come up with is that I'm terrified of where that question might lead me. I'm afraid of losing the happiness I have, of somehow breaking the spell and being expelled from Mt Achievement to wallow in the shadows with the rest of the benighted. I'm worried that subjecting my actions and beliefs to rigorous analysis might somehow invalidate them, and with them the foundation of my happiness.
It's a strange sort of cognitive dissonance, to at once kneel at the altar of skepticism and rationality, and also to shield my most cherished beliefs from same. To be aware of that dissonance, and yet be unwilling or unable to fix it, is stranger still.
When you are down you question yourself a lot more than when you are up. When you are depressed that is all you end up doing. When life is good things aotomatically falls into place becuase you realize that it doesn't matter what you do, all paths are alright, we are all star dust, a spec of life in an ocean of nothing and all that, and in the end it it won't matter if you got good at js or c#. I wouldn't worry about feeling up and oblivious as to why. Just be happy you are.
It's disappointing to see this as the top comment, as it fundamentally misunderstands and misrepresents the point of Sam's post.
Running a startup is a very difficult and stressful activity, especially when things are not going well. The message is not, "get your shit together and succeed." The message is to talk to someone when things are difficult, because loneliness will only make it worse. This is true for any major stressor, whether business, health, or relationship, and the comments here from actual founders all reflect the value of this advice.
It's possible to do both, though. As I pointed out elsewhere in this thead, Sam's post is very helpful and to the point, but there is a lot of undiagnosed psychiatric illness in the startup world. Much of it largely self-inflicted by excessive pressure, lack of sleep and long hours. This is a point which is willfully ignored in this forum, so it's very worthy of being discussed.
It's reassuring to hear someone who's definitely a high-profile industry insider say this, thanks for taking the time to respond. Seems obvious to me as an outsider, but it's probably easy to be blinded by the status quo.
I think you're spot on with your premise (not so sure about your conclusion), and I've certainly heard this sentiment before:
"Success and failure are both difficult to endure. Along with success come drugs, divorce, fornication, bullying, travel, meditation, medication, depression, neurosis and suicide. With failure comes failure."
He's not spot on. Depression is depression. And the answer is to talk to somebody. That's actually the cold hard evidence-based answer. Talk. To somebody.
I've thought a lot about depression over the years. I also
talked to a Psychiatrist about my melancholy for over 20 years. He has told me there are basically three differnt
types of depression; situational(your life sucks), dysthymia(low level depression, that seems to linger),
clinical depression(you want to end it all).
Supposedly, drugs are effective in clinical depression--I
don't think I have been that depressed.
My life flew off the rails years ago. I went from a guy who
thought life, school, and sucess came to easy; to a guy who
couldn't walk in a grocery store because I felt dizzy around
people, and had daily panic attacks. Over the years, the
anxiety improved, but then depression set in. Sleep became
reversed. I became an alohoholic, etc.
Well, I don't have any sure fire cures, but I do know this you will get better with age. There were times when I thought it just isn't going away, but the bad feelings do
go away. You will forget just how bad you felt. I spent
about a year in Therapy(2 x week). I'm not sure how nuch it helped, but it did alleviate some concerns I had at the time. I didn't have any big break throughs, but I'm glad I
went. I found the more a Psychologist charged, or the fact
that they had a Ph.D didn't matter whatsoever. The worst
person I saw was a $400/hr Psychiatrist. The best was a 15.00/hr student working on their Masters. As to medication, you will need to see a Psychiatrist; shop around! Personally, the only medications that worked in my case were highly addictive, but they were better on my body than alcohol I was abusing
All I can say is you will feel better, and you are not alone.
I'm sorry about your experience and hope you keep improving your situation. I do have one question: you say you went from someone who was quite ok to someone who was having a hard time and then you say you know things will get better with age; how do you make sense of this? I'm asking because some people do get more anxious with age so my understanding is things tend to get worse with age but, on a somewhat positive note, you will eventually learn how to deal with it with age as well. So, given you can only work on one of the sides, the end net result can be positive.
What does suck though is you migth spend a big part of your life fighting against yourself. That's something I still have a hard time thinking about, it's hard to accept it.
Yup. I think the real problem here is the overly tight coupling of achievement and self-esteem. You have to separate the two, because otherwise you're stuck on a treadmill with no escape.
I think Elizabeth Gilbert put together an accessible TED talk about this, and it's also in parallel with Albert Ellis's idea of Conditional-Self-Esteem vs Unconditional-Self-Acceptance. All you can hold yourself to is a commitment to showing up and doing the work. The results are almost irrelevant.
After a first reading I felt that it really resonated.
However, if you think of people that do persue what THEY want from life, they are often quite miserable too. Asking yourself "what would you do if money wasn't a concern and you had all the time in the world" ends up not being particularly meaningful. People born into wealthy families try to figure out what THEY want out of life, and end they are just as depressed and full of self-doubt. Sure you can spend a year surfing in Hawaii, or painting, or gardening, but they end up feeling like ephemeral distractions (unless you go all out and turn into an adrenalin junky - though I don't know honestly how happy they are). Lasting motivation comes from your interactions with the world - and often "doing things that OTHER people wanted" is (if you're honest with yourself) to a degree "what YOU wanted out of life" .
As one of those achievers[1] I think it's even worse than you say. I have pretty much made peace with the fact that I am going to be fundamentally miserable for most if not all of my life.
The reason why that is, is because even though I never do things just because others want me to do them[2], I am still very much driven by success and achievement. Not because society compels me to achieve, but because there is an internal drive that just will not shut up. Kundera explained it well in Lightness of Being - there is an inner voice that says you have to. You must. Even though you know full well following this path does not make you happy, moving away from that voice makes you even more miserable. Just because you're not following your talents/gifts[3].
When it comes to success vs. failure. Succeeding brings with it doubts in terms of whether you're succeeding rapidly enough, whether there's more you could be doing, whether your goals are high enough. When you're failing, you're failing and failing never feels good.
And there's nothing that even compares to the emptiness that comes when you achieve a goal. It's soul crushing. All that work and now you're done ... what can you possibly do with your life now? What else is there? What's the next step? If I could achieve this goal, was it even lofty enough?
In the end, I've learned to simply manage my depression and live with it.
[1] I think I fall in the camp, it's hard to say, I've never achieved much that the outside world would laud me for, but I tend to behave like achievers do and have been obsessed with success/achievement ever since I can remember
[2] ask anyone, I am impossible to motivate externally. Beating me with a stick until I do what you ask would probably work eventually, but that's a tad severe.
[3] great Oglaf comic on the topic of talents/gifts wanting to be used: http://oglaf.com/gifted/
I'm curious - could you reframe "following your gifts" as an opportunity instead of an obligation?
I also feel that same drive where I get restless when I feel my talents are being wasted. I think a lot of people do. But when my talents are actually being used, I don't feel miserable or unhappy, but rather content. I think this may be because I don't think in terms of "Am I accomplishing everything I set out to do? Have I made enough of a mark on the world?", but rather in terms of "Am I doing the right things? Am I following the path that will maximize my contributions to the world, given the information I have available?" (Okay, admittedly I've fallen into thinking like the former on occasion, and I tend to become miserably neurotic when I do. But I've worked pretty hard to try and view things in the latter light.)
The former puts the locus of control on the outside world, where you feel responsible for the effects of your actions, even if those effects are outside your control. The latter puts the locus of control on yourself, about your choices. In theory (and in my experience), success follows as a consequence of doing the right things, not as a cause.
And then when I find that something is preventing me from doing the right thing, I ask what it is. Very often, it's myself, and I have some internal fear I need to face and get over. Sometimes, it's someone else, in which case it's time to cut that person or organization out of my life.
> But when my talents are actually being used, I don't feel miserable or unhappy, but rather content.
I think a large part of the problem for me personally is that I am simply getting bored. I need to find either new talents, or a new way to apply my talents. I've been following the same talents and passions for as long as I can remember. Started when I was 9-ish, still going strong 17 years later.
As you allude to, I need a better WHY than "because this is what I'm good at". Hell, very often even just a better WHY than "because I want(ed) to" would be great.
There's nothing wrong with it. It's perfectly valid. But there is something strangely crushing in the freedom to always do exactly (and only) what you want. I can't really explain it.
I think the crushing-ness may come from a (somewhat justifiable, IMHO) fear of solipsism. "Because I want to" is a fundamentally ego-centric view of the universe: your feelings are your own, so what happens if nobody else wants what I want? Are we then alone in the universe?
The solution (at least for me) comes from expanding our view of what "I want" to include people close to us and the outside world as well. And so I do what I want, but my wants also include making the people I care about happy, being a net positive influence on the world, and not turning away from reality even when it seems bleak or painful. In this way, there's no contradiction between achieving things and doing what I want to be doing.
"Be good to yourself, and to others. You cannot do one or the other; it has to be both, or neither."
Well, not all founders are Threes. It would be interesting to type everyone in a YC class (or several) and see what the distribution was. I'd certainly expect some Eights and a smaller number of Sixes. And Fives will of course be well represented among the technical founders.
(Interesting to see someone plugging the Enneagram on HN. Doesn't look like anyone else has picked up on it, though.)
I am very pleased to see other HN readers mention the enneagram. A good friend told me about it a couple of years back and I can honestly say it has helped me better understand myself and others. I see lots of 3's in startups, along with some 1's and 7's. I agree that 5's/8's seem to make up the majority of engineers I've met.
"...I can honestly say it has helped me better understand myself and others"
And that I think is the value of these typologies.
Reading the Wikipedia page about the enneagram, I see a system of nine types with three sub-types, various connections between the types, 'wings' and 'drives'.
Am I being cynical if I think that system considered in the abstract is sufficiently rich to support almost any interpretation?
There is a lot of meat to the Enneagram. If you want to understand yourself better, it's a great thing to study -- and once you see how it applies to you, you'll see there really is something to it.
Evan, I disagree. Your comment goes to great lengths explaining unhappiness in "achievement-oriented" people but you make the mistake of treating "achievement" and "success" as synonyms and therefore the whole reasoning is wrong.
The reality is that achievement and success are really quite different:
Achievement is (some examples)
- running a marathon,
- finishing a PhD,
- winning a prize at a competition,
- getting promoted.
Success is a higher level goal. For a large percentage of males (individual preferences may vary) this includes:
- being well off financially,
- the love of a girl/woman,
- being popular / respect from your peers,
- being powerful and influential.
Unhappiness and depression emerge when your achievements are not in alignment with your picture of success or when there exists the notion of a causality in your head between the two. Finishing a PhD can leave you feel empty and exhausted if your definition of success involves making money quickly. Running a marathon might get you nothing but sore legs if your final goal is to win the heart of a woman.
When achievement and success go hand in hand though I see little very room for depression.
Very well formulated and insightful comment. Thanks for taking the time to write this. A lot of ambitious people seem to struggle with this question of external vs. internal motivation - although I think the most successful entrepeneurs don't, because for some of us this motivation is in fact internal. Some can actually say "do what you love/love what you do" and not lie through their teeth. And others are able to treat it in a purely businesslike manner, i.e. "this is a job and it's only temporary".
Many others, though, are as you say: Ambitious because external pressures have always told you it is a good idea, and because teachers, parents, professors and peers have always given you recognition for good work - it's a central part of your identity.
What a good response, I first read sam article and agreed to him but with good response changed a lot. I still feel there is a problem with life that is tradeoff. Lets see right from the start when we are born in this world we don't have any thoughts or goals nothing. The world start giving us reality. Suppose most of the people here on HN will want to be a better programmer and improve themselves. In Programming they find something good. Ideally as they were born with nothing so how they can say this is actually they want, so when people say this is what they really want I think they still say what the world them to say. Now the next point come when people make decision and then repent, its a tradeoff. Suppose Right now someone have option of doing a PHD in Physics( which is my passion) and other to roam across world in some job( which also he wants). He choose PHD and after 10 years he say he didn't satisfied with PHD he must have took the job, I feel we human always do that because we enjoy the first think and now we will say we didn't enjoy it much and want other think. Yes, I agree people say that enjoy their work and is in resonance with it because they don't have some equal tradeoff to make their work for them is given to world by them as a best thing.
If I don't indulge in that coffee-guzzling manic carrot chasing mind-set then I'm not going to be as productive as the next guy it would seem. If you want to be an olympic bike racer then you have to do the same harsh practice regime that the rest of the athletes are doing in order to stay in shape.
The difference is that some founders learn how to 'snap out of it', to decompress when they need to decompress. In other words they learn how to relax deeply into the felt presence of whatever arises in the mind and body. They don't teach that in school, nor on the job, but quite often life finds a way to teach that lesson.
The forth way stuff doesn't resonate with me personally. I'm feeling the buddha dhamma especially the early stuff.. ie the 3 characteristics, vipassana/samatha. If I had to delve into something less ancient I'd look more closely at Zen.
I felt the blind achievement in college. Defining your year through the pressure of graduating, until you see your marksheet. The fear turns into happiness for about 5 minutes. As soon as you left the room, you start to wonder ... So what do you do ? well enroll for the next year. Until colleges end and you feel void.
>Founders need to take a hard look in the mirror and ask themselves why they're doing what they're doing and whether their depression is truly a function of their free cash flow or if there's a deeper dissonance between the founder's feelings and the expectations of society, i.e. the heroic mythology of the founder that Silicon Valley has been inculcating in susceptible teenagers for the last 20 years.
No, I think depression is a function of free cash flow for most "founders." The heroic mythology is mostly about getting really rich.
And how else do you justify highly intelligent people caring so much about laundry? Because I seriously doubt solving laundry or food delivery or ridesharing has anything to do with any social mission.
These boring things have everything to do with making lots of money.
The video is about women, because as men we like to take pride in the idea that we're "fixers", but if we're honest about it we'll have to admit that when it comes to the important things in life we're just as full of crap.
No amount of talking, hand-holding, support groups and nods of understanding will amount to any kind of personal progress, until you are willing to answer the question "What do you really want?"
You want to be productive? Have a successful startup? Million dollars? Improve the lives of others?
Sure. But why? What's behind it? We like to look for an objective meaning in things, but what is meaning other than the belief in a cosmic points system that will bestow rewards upon us if we play our roles right?
Whether you are a startup founder, career person, scientist, devout christian, philanthropist, volunteer or whatever makes no essential difference here - pretty much everyone chases some ill-defined ideal in the hope that somehow some ill-defined someone or something will save us and make everything alright when we reach some ill-defined goal.
And when you do succeed, what do you really have to show for it? Years of sacrifice gone that you'll never get back, even more expectations than before, because now you're supposed to act like a successful person, even more anxiety that you'll disappoint the people who idolize you, eager to believe in the fairy-tale that you've made it and everything's happily-ever-after-picture-perfect. Everyone has at least some stories of disappointment with success. Everyone knows people who do. Show me one happily ever after.
It's a blind gamble with the only thing we do have - time, and we keep pissing that away because it's easier than seriously asking the question that could shake the very foundation of the persons we believe ourselves to be and the reality we believe ourselves to live in.
Everything needs to be ill-defined, because otherwise we would see that it doesn't make sense and couldn't keep pretending that we're doing something worthwhile while what we're actually doing is killing time waiting for death and imagining that there's no hurry and someone's coming to save us.
To seriously and honestly admit what you want is fucking hard. It's a question that takes no prisoners. The very act of asking sets you apart from family, friends and society, forces you to see that in the things that matter to you most, you are in fact alone. For most of us considering an honest answer to that question amounts to what is commonly considered one of the greatest sins - being selfish.
We're afraid of being selfish, we're afraid of sinning against the people around us by rejecting their rules and desires, we're afraid of being alone and we're afraid of dying, so we keep playing our roles and pretending to everyone around us.
At the same time deep inside we know that nothing matters, we know that we're all selfish by design, we know we have nothing to lose because we'll all be gone soon anyway and we have a pretty good idea of what we want to do before we end up cancer-ridden in a hospice, smiling bitterly at the memory of what used to matter to us and the times when we could have lived but didn't because we were too busy pretending we could hide from death.
My girlfriend just came in the room and glanced at my screen as I'm finishing typing this and for a second I was really terrified she'd see what I was writing. It seemed ridiculous to at first, but then I realized I just don't want to admit that realizing things amounts to nothing unless you act.
Everything we do in life is to feel a certain way.
Anything with a brain is driven to acquire certain feelings and move away from others.
And all feelings have to do with the future.
That is, feelings are either
1. a prediction of what you believe will happen in the future. For example, happiness is the belief that something good will happen in the future.
2. a feeling that you should feel in the future when you come across this event again (data for #1 to work). For example, pain happens after you lose something, and this serves as a reminder for the future, if you ever come across this event again, don't do what you just did.
So on the topic of the post, what is depression?
Depression is the belief that you will not have good things happen to you in the future.
It comes from what you believe (in your emotional brain), not what you think. And your beliefs come from memories (which in turn come from experiences).
The more recent a memory / experience, the stronger it is. If you have few experiences of good things happening in the past X timeframe, you will start to become depressed. X varies for people, it can be 3 months or 3 years.
So what counts as a good thing or a bad thing?
It all comes from how you interpret experiences. This can be controlled consciously, but only if you bring your emotional brain into the meeting and communicate with it in language it understands (action and visualization).
For example, I used to be addicted to reddit. While I consciously knew it wasn't good to be going to reddit so much, my emotional brain didn't mind. But after discovering a process that uses these principles, I quit "cold-turkey" by imagining a lot of bad stuff in relation to reddit. I wrote (I find writing a good method for visualizing) about all the stuff I was missing out on because of reddit. I wrote about how all I was doing there was arguing with a bunch of fat sweaty no-life neckbeards, which would only lead to bad things to me. Then after I wrote this, I went to delete my reddit account and I thought "whoa this is serious" (you HAVE to feel this way, a.k.a. surprise. Surprise happens when your emotional brain realizes it's past way of thinking is invalid). I thought about it for a couple minutes, but followed through and deleted it. After that, I never went on it for months and would be repulsed at the idea of going there. I rarely go there now.
Anyway, about depression specifically to entrepreneurs or "goal oriented" people.
I believe the way to be happy here is to change our beliefs. The goal shouldn't be to have success, but to do the things well that lead to success.
Let's say you want to build a wall (think of the wall as your goal). If you're only happy if you have the wall, then you will be sad throughout the journey until the end when the wall is easy to see finished.
Then after the wall is made, well you don't necessarily have anything good to look forward to now (which is what happiness is), so your happiness will start to drop.
But what if instead, our happiness wasn't dependant on whether we have a wall or not, but rather how many bricks we laid today?
Then we could look forward to "I'm going to lay X bricks today!" and get a much faster success feedback loop.
I'm going to try a process similar to the reddit one above to link good things not with having the wall, but with laying the bricks.
I'm not disagreeing with anything you say, but it's interesting to see how different people get different things out of Reddit. Reddit (and to a similar extent, YouTube) makes me laugh my ass off and see different perspectives every single day that it absolutely improves my state of mind with no real negatives (although I don't generally comment or get into long threads when I do) :-) Any day with a few bouts of hard laughter is a good one by me, despite anything else that happens.
>Everything we do in life is to feel a certain way.
I've heard that hypothesised, mostly in Tony Robbins style self help books, but have come to the conclusion that it's an oversimplification of the human condition. I mean if you were building a Mk2 human from scratch you might build it that way be we did not arise that way - we evolved from reptile like creatures which had extra stuff bolted on when they evolved to monkey like, chimp like and finally human like beings. As a result much of what we do is as a result of ancient mechanisms resulting in actions that do not always make us feel good. For example you might lose you temper and hit or shout at someone in ways you feel bad about almost straight away but it was not done to feel good, it was done because some ancient aggression instinct got triggered.
This stuff I think complicates the whole business of dealing with depression which like aggression often comes from the more primitive parts of the brain. I'm not sure what the answer is. Trial and error to some extent. Also it can be interesting to look at what makes cat, dogs and the like happy or sad as we are probably subject to the same mechanisms.
To put it in a different way, everything we do is because of the feelings we feel.
'Feeling' is a very broad term. My definition is the sum of your nervous system's activity.
What your nervous system decides to do - and what you feel like doing, are equal statements in my view.
That doesn't mean there's no inner conflict - there is. But if you imagine every neuron as a voter in a democratic election, the decision that gets the most votes is the one that you feel like doing, even though you are aware there are private interest groups of neurons that want something else.
> For example, I used to be addicted to reddit. While I consciously knew it wasn't good to be going to reddit so much, my emotional brain didn't mind. But after discovering a process that uses these principles, I quit "cold-turkey" by imagining a lot of bad stuff in relation to reddit.
I like what you did there ... but when the wall is finished, if there isn't another to build, then there are no more bricks to lay. Or is that not a problem, since the new cause of joy (brick-laying, not wall completion) is one which was continuous over an extended time?
I disagree. Your psychological understanding has a long way to go.
In fact, this sounds like someone rationalizing a lack of achievement rather than trying to understand the true motivations of an achievement oriented person.
The path is not masochistic or narcissistic. In fact, I take offense to that.
The path is what separates the wheat from the chaff. It is the price for admission...table stakes.
Achievement oriented people don't suffer depression because of regret, they suffer depression because that too is a requirement for playing the game. I can only speak for myself, but by the time I have achieved something I wanted, I'm already thinking about the next goal. When I finally reach the first goal, I have little time to celebrate, but that's OK because it's not the goal that rewards us, but the path to achieving it.
The difference between being depressed by it and not being depressed by it is realizing that one cannot continually achieve without being dissatisfied. The two go hand in hand. Once I realized that, everything changed.
That said, there is some insight buried within your conclusion. Depression reaches its peak when a person defines themselves by their work and/or achievements. The best way to overcome that is to become a whole person. My personal approach is to play sports, go running, practice hobbies, and spend time with my family.
Of course, none of this really helps when things are going poorly or you are failing. In those times, the only remedy is to come to terms with the fact that you could lose it all, and let's face it - that's a reality that none of us want to accept until it happens, and even then we'll battle it.
I've been to that point twice, and each time sucked worse than that last. However, it's the only fuel I need to prevent myself from allowing it to happen again.
So to get back to Sam's point and give it the attention it deserves - yes, talking to someone will help, but so too will the realization that it's never over. It sounds cliche, but Lombardi was right. "It's not whether you got knocked down, it's whether you get back up" that counts. Define yourself as a fighter, not by a single fight.
you insulted the OP twice in your first two sentences. then you said that depression is "table stakes"...after that, it's extremely hard for the rest of your long and well-written comment to be taken seriously. just an observation.
If being honest and truthful is an insult, then there's nothing I can do about that. I'm insulted by his attempts to get into my head without actually understanding what makes it tick. His comment was extremely presumptuous.
Achievement-oriented people are given to depression both when they fail and when they succeed. If your identity is tied up in your work, then you feel bad about yourself when work isn't going well. That's obvious, and that's the message of this blog post. The implicit message is that you're depressed because you're not succeeding, so get your shit together and succeed and be happy like everyone else.
But then if you do succeed, you start to wonder, why did I just spend my youth in this masochistic, narcissistic path, and why the fuck am I not as happy as I was expecting, and is this really all there is in life. This is a classic "achiever in crisis." The problem is that you realize all along you've been doing things that OTHER people wanted -- that is, you've been doing things that make you valuable in society -- perfect summed up in the raison d'etre du jour, "making the world a better place." And nobody stopped you, because who can argue with making the world a better place? (Or being a doctor, or whatever.) But upon reflection, you quickly realize that this was in many ways easier than asking yourself what YOU wanted out of life. I.e. you've pushed aside your innate feelings and desires, whatever they may have been, and replaced them with the external motivation of achievement, under the rationale that you'd be able to "figure it out" after you had "made it".
Unfortunately achievers aren't really sure what they want "deep down" because achievement is inherently defined by society, and then after they've "made it" they freak out because they start to wonder if there even is a "deep down" or if they're just a highly educated donkey chasing a carrot.
If you talk to e.g. people who've gone through rigorous Ph.D. programs, you'll find a number of them were severely depressed after their defense. It was just kind of a let-down after such a long buildup, and then they started to wonder why they invested the entirety of their twenties into it and question whether that's really what they wanted their life to be. At least before the defense they could have something look forward to, and the various requirements provided a source of manic energy to propel the achiever forward.
Anyway I don't think the problem here is "not enough success," and I don't think the solution is having more coffee meetings. Founders need to take a hard look in the mirror and ask themselves why they're doing what they're doing and whether their depression is truly a function of their free cash flow or if there's a deeper dissonance between the founder's feelings and the expectations of society, i.e. the heroic mythology of the founder that Silicon Valley has been inculcating in susceptible teenagers for the last 20 years.
Just my 2c. I am not a founder just an observer and aspiring societal psychiatrist. If you want to learn more I highly recommend "The Wisdom of the Enneagram":
http://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Enneagram-Psychological-Spiritu...
It looks a lot like astrological pseudoscientific trash but read it and see if things in it resonate with you.
Ok back to work.