How I Stopped Being An Asshole Entrepreneur

I used to be an asshole. Not in the self-deprecating, funny, quirky sort of way. I used to be the kind of asshole who would make people leave dinner parties and resign jobs. The kind of asshole that people don’t want to work for, don’t want to socialise with and don’t want to call their friend. 

I’m not trying to be humorous here either. It was very difficult to be around me for many years.

Unbelievably, I wore this like a badge of honour, an “A-badge” if you will. I used to proudly declare that upon meeting me, 50% of people hated me immediately and from the rest, I would try to patch together friends or business partners. Those are some shitty odds to impose upon yourself.

Being an entrepreneur is a conflicting endeavour. It’s your job to stay positive, to build something from nothing, to create a narrative and build a vision of the future that you can sell to other people so that they join you and help you build this vision of the future. It’s also your job to get the best out of people and build hard things, to strive for perfection and fight for survival, to be well-read in a wide range of topics while you dive deeply into your particular vertical. It’s a combative career choice filled with ego, failure and massive success if you get a million variables right at precisely the right time. 

Entrepreneurs are always competing. With themselves, with their colleagues, with fellow entrepreneurs, with actual competitors, with partners, siblings, parents and anyone else we can find along the way to compete with. 

There are books, TV shows, podcasts, articles, interviews, movies and legends of entrepreneurial assholes who created the world we live in today because they pushed for perfection at every possible turn. The example that jumps to mind is Steve Jobs. A notorious asshole perfectionist who excelled in almost every avenue of business that he touched. I read the Steve Jobs biography written by Walter Isaacson when it came out in 2011 and instantly became an even bigger asshole than I already was. You cannot fathom the magnitude of asshole that I was at this time. It must have been unbearable. It was laughably predictable and embarrassingly ineffective to fall into the trap of believing that the core reason for his success was that Jobs was an asshole and to repeat his success I just needed to be an asshole too. 

That is absolutely, 100% not the message of the Jobs biography. The message is that Jobs had to learn to be less of an asshole to truly find success and happiness. I completely missed this message and ploughed forward treating my friends, family and staff like they were mere mortals and I was a god sent to them to create a company that would change the world. 

I didn’t change the world and nor did my company. 

I was never going to change the world with that shitty attitude. 

It wasn’t just in my professional life that I was an asshole. In my twenties, I would attend dinner parties with close friends and slowly manipulate the conversation toward topics that I was comfortable with and had read up on extensively so that I could appear to be the smartest person in the room. I am embarrassed by this looking back on it now and don’t know how I kept any friends at all. But the shocking thing is that when I looked back on this time with my psychologist I realised that slowly but surely, as I started to manipulate the conversation more and more, my friends would quietly pay their bills and leave, one after the other. They literally couldn’t stand to be near me. 

Something had to change. 

The breakthrough for me came when I was forced to drive myself to the hospital, burned out with a stomach ulcer that was ready to burst at 2 am in the morning. 

I had nobody around me. My partner was in a different part of the country. I had left my family, my friends weren’t close enough friends to call at 2 am and I was desperate. 

So over the next few years I started to drag myself out of the asshole spiral. 

Here are a few things that changed my life:

Find A Professional

You think you can psychologise yourself. You can’t. 

You think you can therapise yourself. You can’t. 

You think you can council yourself. You can’t. 

You need a mental coach as much as you need a personal trainer for your muscles. If you are trying to be the best entrepreneur you can be, you need perspective, you need a coach, you need a psychologist, you need help. 

And why wouldn’t you utilise every possible resource to become the best version of yourself? Why wouldn’t you want better mental health, stronger mental fortitude, more resilience and the ability to gain perspective on your actions?

I thought I was fine without professional help until I bit the bullet and found a psychologist who changed my life. 

Listen More, Talk Less

I started to derive energy and value from listening and not talking. This was one of the most difficult changes I had to make. 

I finally understood my grandfather telling me that people have two ears and one mouth for a reason. Listen more than you talk. It’s incredible what you can learn when you shut your mouth and listen. 

This applies to your business, your personal life, strangers, meetings and everything else. 

Listen and learn don’t talk and enforce. 

My Opinion vs Your Opinion

I read a lot and that provides me with strong opinions about a lot of topics. I am not right about these things, I just have strong opinions about them. 

But here’s the thing: I know what my opinions are. I don’t know what yours are. 

What’s the best way to figure out what other people think? Listen to them. 

When I reframed listening as the acquisition of other people’s opinions, everything changed. I began to listen to my team, my partner, my parents, my friends, and people online and devour their opinions so that I could challenge my own. 

Your opinion is only valuable when it is held up against other people’s opinions. If you never challenge your perspective then how do you know it holds up?

Winning

I realised that just because my opinion was right for me didn’t mean it was the right opinion.

I studied debating at school. Debate is an art. It’s not a stupid Twitter argument with a nameless, faceless troll. But not every conversation is a debate. Debates usually require two opposing sides to battle one another and in the end, there is a winner and a loser. 

Sometimes a conversation is just an exchange of opinions, not a battle. Trust me, you’re not going to change anyone’s mind over a beer at a pub. So get comfortable expressing your opinion and then moving on. 

Personal Values

At the start of my transformation from asshole to whatever I was becoming, I started to codify my personal values into what I now call my Nicisms. 

Whenever I experienced something that shifted my perspective enough I would write it down and over time I evolved these perspectives into a set of personal values that I now live by. Some drop out occasionally and new ones enter when they shift my world again but on the whole, they are constant and help me lighten the cognitive load of decision making. 

Here are my Nicisms, in case you need some examples: 

1. There is nothing after this

2. Learn the rules but ignore them

3. Be honest if possible

4. Do more but sometimes wait

5. Be patient

6. Trust people until you have a reason not to

7. Listen more, talk less

8. Everything is easier without ego

9. Burn it all down if you have to

10. Strong opinions loosely held

11. Be consistent

12. I am not building a future. I am building a life.

13. Find an optimal challenge

These values trickle into every aspect of my life. They help me figure out what businesses to build, and who to bring into and remove from my life. They help me quieten the asshole within. 

Learn to Apologise

I hate losing. I hate getting things wrong. I hate when other people tell me something and I disagree but am proving wrong later on. I hate it. 

I hated getting things wrong so much in my past that apologising was agonising for me. It was a sign of weakness. It was proof that someone else had beaten me. 

This applied to my friends, my life partner, my co-founders, my employees and mentors, everyone. I hated apologising or admitting I was wrong. 

But then one day my partner and I got into a fight/debate about a petty issue and she said something to me that rocked my foundation: 

“You realise we’re on the same team, right?”

I stopped dead in my tracks. 

I thought about her statement for a minute and then realised that we were, in fact, on the same team. So I apologised for my aggressive approach, listened to her opinion, decided I was wrong and her view was the appropriate one and moved on. 

Apologising is a sign of strength, not weakness. 

This newfound ability to apologise and mean it sincerely has changed my life for the better. 

It helped me drop my ego, it helped me bring people into a safe space and provide them with an intellectual victory that imbues confidence and makes them feel good. “Losing” can be a form of winning if you’re playing a long enough game. 

If you’re all on the same team then the end goal must surely be victory for everyone, not just for you at this particular moment?

Being an asshole entrepreneur was holding me back and it’s probably holding you back too. 

It’s a fallacy that you need to be an asshole to be effective. It’s fallacy that only the assholes survive and thrive in business or as entrepreneurs. 

I know a lot of successful people who are nice too and I want to be one of them. This is how I have started my journey.

Mike Scott - The challenging necessity of cultivating feedback

In the first episode of season 3 of the Curious Cult, I am thrilled to chat with Mike Scott about why curiosity can be difficult but how it can help you evolve, why design by committee is bad but consensus can work and a whole bunch of other exciting topics.

In the first episode of season 3 of the Curious Cult, I am thrilled to chat with Mike Scott about why curiosity can be difficult but how it can help you evolve, why design by committee is bad but consensus can work and a whole bunch of other exciting topics. 

Mike is the co-founder of NONA, a firm which builds intuitive software for companies across the world. Mike believes strongly in habit-optimisation and is obsessed with learning and consuming knowledge. 

Key take aways from the episode:

• Lesson-learning in business happens through the process
  Through the process of building, starting and exiting a business as a teenager, Mike learnt a lot of lessons, met a lot of incredible people (who he’s working with now), made a lot of mistakes and developed the skills to continue building businesses.

• Integration over work-life balance
  NONA is now trying to create the best place for people to work in and they’re striving to create a place where life is not all about work. They’re trying to create a place where it’s not about finding that work-life balance, but integration is more important and more sustainable.
  The world is filled with business. All we do is work work work.

• Businesses have their own value beyond the revenue they generate
  As a young entrepreneur, Mike realising that companies can have their own value - and not just the profit that’s made through operations. Realising this is a game-changer in the way businesses are run.

• Be wary of someone who asks for trust

• Curiosity goes against the grain of simply believing something. It goes with analysing, learning and exploring something to find out more information to make an opinion of it first.

• Don’t take advice from someone not being bold with their lives

• When you start working on yourself, when you start evolving and growing, you are going to go through the pain
  Whether it’s the loss of friends, family, partners. Self-work comes at the sacrifice on things because it warrants change and inspiration.

• Feedback leads to possible challenge, but also necessary to make the best decisions
  At NONA, one of the fundamental messages is for people to speak up if there’s a problem with a decision. The culture comes with a lot of difficulties (especially related to ego), but it positions the business as one where the best possible outcomes come from the best possible people. 

For more information or to chat with Mike, find him on LinkedIn or check out NONA. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it far and wide and let’s start changing the world with curiosity.

20 Things 2011 taught me about my business

2011 has been one of the most intense, fun and challenging years of my business life. I've had my fair share of insane highs and crushing lows.Speaking to people in the last few weeks I noticed that many of my thoughts begin with, "And another thing I learned this year is...". So here is a list of 20 things that I learned in 2011 as a startup founder and now the CEO of Motribe.1. Hire slowly, fire quickly.2. Trust your gut about: People, deals, businesses and contracts.3. One deal can break your company.4. One deal can make your company.5. Don't scale your staff with one big client. They will leave you (staff and client), eventually.6. Cashflow, cashflow, cashflow. Startups worry about revenues, entrepreneurs know the value of cashflow.7. Be transparent with your team, they know when something is going on.8. If you have to, work on a public holiday, your biggest deals could happen after hours. Great business minds don't keep office hours.9. Don't listen to people who like to talk, listen to people who like to listen and have achieved.10. You know best more often than not. Trust your instincts.11. Avoid people-politics and games where possible.12. Be honest, open and transparent. If you aren't happy, tell someone.13. Fire bad clients.14. Be picky about who you work with.15. Don't do business just for the money.16. Do whatever it takes.17. No one knows your business like you do, fight for it.18. Make the best decision you can at the time with the facts at your disposal.19. Say "Fuck it", and take the risks necessary for great success.20. Have a co-founder or business partner who you can rely on. When shit gets heavy you need someone to back you up.It's hard to pick the most important lessons from the list above but for me I think that number 6, 16 and 20 are right up there.What lessons did you learn about your business in 2011?

9-5 or working your own hours?

I have been resisting employment for a while now. I can't really say why for sure but one of the reasons was the 9-5 brand. I didn't want to work to make someone else money. No no no. I was detered by the hours for sure. I was insistent that working for someone else would restrict my flexibility. This was my steadfast opinion.However things have changed, slightly. When you are working for yourself, or to make your own idea work you lose sight. You lose sight of rational working hours, of the distinction between work and play. Free time becomes a thing of the past. You become obsessive about making things work (especially in the online industry where normal trading hours do not ever apply). Thus you don't really notice that you are waking up at 7 and working till 11pm. You don't notice because you don't care. You are driven, focused and as I've already noted, obsessive.In short (like I'm ever short) when you are an entrepreneur you are consumed by what you do 100%. Often when you work for someone else you do just that, you work. You work 9-5 hours and stop working when you get home. This is the joy of work, you get to stop. Somehow many people miss this small joy. Trust me when I say it is a joy when you are (or should be) able to leave work at work.In today's day and age with the internet around working hours, jobs, the usual are not the usual anymore. Things have changed, variety is the norm. Things are happening and sometimes, working hours are fantastic.

Online Business Is Tough

Let us be perfectly honest. Making money online in SA is difficult unless you are employed by a big media house (which in itself is tough).Those who know me or read this blog will know that I am an entrepreneur and media practitioner and not necessarily in that order. This means that I am broke some of the time. This gets old really really fast, if you don't know, trust me on this one.What I am getting at is that it's tough to make a living online, it is. I am really curious to know if there are gabillions of online entrepreneurs in SA who are making boatloads of money or at least, are making a living? Are you out there? If you are, let me know cause I wanna know how you did it.Who am I kidding? As if anyone who made the dosh is going to splurge their secrets to me on this blog? Are you?

Young Dumb And Full Of ...

Being a young entrepreneur has opened my eyes to numerous things in the last year. The most amazing of all of these things is the astounding amount of young people doing incredible things.Be it entrepreneurs, media practitioners, young accountants, academics or wood importers (yes, there are people who import wood), there are young people succeeding and making millions.It really does beg the questing though, how do we manage? How do these young and successful people deal with the pressure of being broke, being wealthy, carrying employees, salaries, decisions, organisations, reputations, meetings, dinners, parties, presentations, financials, tax, registrations and more? How?I am not sure that all of these young go getters are managing to do all of this to be honest. I am sick of seeing people loving life, happy as the day is long and rich as shit. Bull. Ask any entrepreneur and they will tell you that their success did not come easy and did not come fast. It came after planning, work, failure and diligence.There are many young people in the SA industry at the moment who are youthful, talented and going to be successful. There are also many people who are young and talented but who are also arrogant, naive, idiotic and moronic if they think that the sun shines out of their ass and the job will make them who they want to be.You make the job, the job does not ever make you. Let's just be honest here for a second, reputation is not everything, practical experience and a history of success is. Your friends make you, you on the same level, make your friends. Do not let the job taint your life, your lively hood and your friends. There is more, at our age (my age of 23) than the job. There really is.

Are You a Key Man?

Are you a key man in your business? Do you represent your business and the interests therein? Are you the face of the brilliance?If so then some might term you to be the key man in your business (you could also be the key woman, but I am a man so we'll run with that). If you are the "key man" in your business then you will understand the pressure that you are under to perform.The Key Man does not, in any way imply the best person, the performer or the smartest most successful person in your business. You are simply (in my mind) the man that the business relies on. As the term itself states, the Key Man.This concept has started to plague my mind a bit. As a young entrepreneur I am battling with the idea that I might be, and more than likely am a Key Man in my company. The issue here is simple: I am where I am because I love what I do. I run websites, I help build them, I promote them, update date them, punt them and live them. This, in theory makes me the key man. I also meet with potential investors, advertisers and marketers. This makes me an entrepreneur. Being the key man involves a lot of participation. This is where the problem comes in.If I am managing 3 websites and contributing to 3 blogs, I am spending more than half my day online involved in the sites. This leaves very little time to actually be an entrepreneur. To find clients, to keep them, to meet with potential advertisers, to develop new products to market your existing ones and to simply run a company and manage all your shareholders.This is something that is increasingly concerning me. One of the solutions is to hire people to manage and maintain certain projects. How do you get someone in to raise your own children, all day every day? I am not comfortable with that. I like my hands on approach very much. I like being under a bit of pressure to perform because that is when I perform the best. But also, I am the key man and hence I am many of the sites I run. This blog for one. Who would read nicharalambous.com if it wasn't updated by nicharalambous himself? No one. It is as simple as that.I don't have an answer to this conundrum and I am not sure that there is a specific answer to the problem. I think that this might be one of those situations where experience and time dictate the route that each entrepreneur needs to follow.