How do you prepare yourself mentally to be an entrepreneur?

So how do you prepare yourself mentally to be an entrepreneur? What I will say is maybe borrowing a little bit from Buddhism or philosophical Hinduism, but it's really this notion to try to not get attached to the outcome.

Obviously, you're going into entrepreneurship because you're imagining that, one, you could be your own boss. You'll be able to apply your creative ideas. You'll be able to do a service for the world. But it's good to go into it with a bit of a zen philosophy where you're going to do what's right. You're going to do what's in service of the customer or the user or whoever you are serving. But you're not going to define yourself based on how successful you are or not.

Because what typically happens in entrepreneurship is that you start with this optimism. And that's where I started to do it. It's almost delusional, or sometimes can be. You might quit your job and then you go into it, and you quickly realize that the world doesn't immediately come to recognize the brilliance of what you might be working on.

There will likely be a period where you'll really question yourself. You'll be looking at your finances; you'll be depleting your finances. And it's all that much worse if your ego is heavily invested in that as well. If you say, "What will people think of me? What is going to happen to my career? I'm not going to afford the lifestyle that I'm used to."

But if you suppress your ego a little bit and say, "I'm doing this for the good of the world, whether it's for-profit, nonprofit, whatever it is. I'm doing it in service to others and I'm doing what's right. Hopefully, we'll have a good outcome," but you're not super attached to it, then it's going to lower the anxiety level.

I heard a quote recently that anxiety is misplaced. And, you know, I think most entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs, one thing they have a surplus of is imagination. And that's a great thing, but sometimes your imagination can get into cycles of all of the bad things that will happen or how people will think of you, etc., etc. So I would try not to go there.

If you do that, I think you'll just be more resilient. Because a lot of entrepreneurial ideas, it's not a matter of whether it's a good idea or not. It's not a matter of even whether you're executing well or not. You do need to execute well, but sometimes it's a matter of timing. The more resilient you can make yourself, also, the more resilient you can make your business.

So making yourself resilient, we're talking about mental resilience. You can make yourself financially resilient by living below your means, having a lot of savings. You can make your business financially resilient so that it can hit the timing at the right time or have more time to be able for the market to recognize its value.

If you do it in a very lean way and if you're always taking new data points and processing it, and that's the other place where it's good to suppress your ego. Because sometimes, early on, you get so enamored with an idea that even if some data points, even if some research, even if some customers are telling you that that's not exactly what they want, your confirmation bias almost makes you think, "Well, I'm talking to the wrong people" or "that data might not be right."

Maybe that's the case. But I think the less that you have your ego super invested in your idea that it's your idea, the more that you'll be willing to pivot and the more that you're willing to change.

You know, famously in the early days of Khan Academy, when I was working on all the software, I showed it to a friend, and he suggested I make videos to supplement the software. I immediately thought it was a horrible idea. But it took a little bit of my ego suppression to realize that, you know, just because I didn't think of it doesn't mean it's a bad idea.

Just because other people had done it didn't mean it was a bad idea. So I said, "Let me try it out." There was a unique take on how I was doing it to complement the software that that very nascent Khan Academy was doing that really helped us get off the ground.

So what I would say is become resilient. A lot of that is being aware of your ego. You don't have to destroy your ego, but know it's there, and you have to put it in its place every now and then. Always be open to new data. Make yourself financially and mentally resilient, and do the same for your organization or your nascent organization that you're starting.