The Anxious Entrepreneur: Anxiety Defeats Creativity - Creativity Defeats Anxiety

By Tiisetso Maloma

Over time, our anxiety builds up; it either implodes or explodes. My anxiety has gotten me to that point several times. Through the years I have stumbled across, and even formulated, some anxiety-defusing techniques.

Anxiety invades our productivity and therefore our goals. All it takes is to not see progress in a day, then a week or a month. The next thing you know, you are standing at the peak of the highest anxiety hill, depressingly recalling your record of failures and doubting your future.

It is a collection of anecdotes, emotions, feelings, frustrations and philosophies that will show you that, when anxiety is removed from your entrepreneurial process, creativity reaches its optimum.

You cannot be anxious and creative at the same time. Anxiety trumps creativity and creativity trumps anxiety.

The Anxious Entrepreneur is for aspiring and start-up entrepreneurs. It will get you in tune with the ventures you love and introduce you to robust ways of pursuing them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9781365454134

Book preview

THE ANXIOUS ENTREPRENEUR

Anxiety Defeats Creativity - Creativity Defeats Anxiety

TIISETSO MALOMA

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Copyright

THE ANXIOUS ENTREPRENEUR

By Tiisetso Maloma

Copyright © 2015 Tiisetso Maloma

All Rights Reserved

ISBN print: 9781516877355

ISBN ePUB eBook: 9781365454134

First published 10 October 2016

Published by Bula Buka – www.bulabuka.co.za

Edited by Lara Stander

Cover designed by Ofentse Mokgatle

Layout, eBook conversion and online distribution by www.bulabuka.co.za

Author website www.tiisetsomaloma.co.za

This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means electrical, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise – without prior written permission of the author.

Books by Tiisetso Maloma

Forget the Business Plan Use This Short Model

Innovate the Next

The Anxious Entrepreneur

Understanding the 4th Industrial Revolution & Innovation Easily

Future of Township Economies

Township Biz Fastrack

Tales of an African Entrepreneur

Introducing Ubuntu Stoicism

90 Days to Create & Launch

Innovate Like Elon Musk

The author, Tiisetso Maloma

Tiisetso Maloma is a South African entrepreneur and author with ten published books.

His work centres around providing simple frameworks to understand entrepreneurship, innovation, economics, and consumer behaviour.

Maloma specializes in the creation and launch of products.

It is believed by Tiisetso that this is the easiest, cheapest, and quickest time in history to be an entrepreneur and innovator, a belief also reflected in the subtitle of his tenth book, 90 Days to Create & Launch.

Among Maloma's books are Innovate Like Elon Musk, The Anxious Entrepreneur, Future of Township Economies, Innovate The Next, and Forget the Business Plan Use This Short Model.

Tiisetso has developed various business models and frameworks, including The EBC Business Model, The Human Greed Pyramid, and Product Adjacent Possible Success Factors.

Over the past 14 years, he has played a significant role in the creation of over hundred-products, resulting in thousands of sales.

Tiisetso Maloma has made noteworthy contributions to the South African publishing industry as a pioneering publisher and investor in the genre of diary chronicle books through Bula Buka Publishers. The publishing house has released titles such as Diary of a Cheating Wife, Diary of a Side Chick, Chronicles of a Slay Queen, and Diary of a Zulu Girl, among many others.

Maloma's professional endeavours span multiple industries, including accounting, clothing, publishing, tech, media, and events.

Tiisetso has collaborated with various organizations such as Standard Bank, The Innovation Hub, Sappi, ABSA, The Hope Factory, Transnet, and the City of Tshwane.

His work has been featured on The Huffington Post, CNBC Africa, How We Made It In Africa, Under 30 CEO, and Destiny Man.

In addition, Maloma has founded and co-founded businesses including Bula Buka, Startup Picnic Academy, Gabble Heights Clothing, eKhaya Moji, and Defuse Anxiety.

Disclaimers & definitions

I am not a professional mental health expert. This book is not a substitute for consulting professionals on mental health.

This book does not concern itself with defining anxiety, depression, or any other mental or mood illnesses. Its aim is to help you attain a healthy mood for sanity, productivity and creativity.

Medical journals, however, describe anxiety as a persisting sense of doubt and vulnerability about the future, or future events. It is characterised by fear, nervousness, apprehension and worrying. It can become severe to the extent of debilitating you in your daily life and functions.

The journals state also, that depression is generally a more severe mental or mood disorder that causes a persistent feeling of sadness and despondency. It affects how you feel, think, live and behave. It hinders normal day-to-day functions. Its symptoms often are; trouble sleeping or oversleeping, loss of appetite, weight loss, loss of interest in activities that once were joyful, difficulty thinking and making decisions.

The information provided in this book is designed to provide helpful information on the subjects discussed. This book is not meant to be used to diagnose any medical condition. For diagnosis or treatment of any medical problem, consult a physician. The publisher, author and editor are not responsible for any specific health or allergy problems that may require medical supervision and are not liable for any damages, or negative consequences, from any treatment, action, application or preparation, to any person reading, or following the information in this book.

References are provided for informational purposes only and do not constitute endorsement of any websites or other sources. Readers should be aware that the websites listed in this book may change.

Reading this book

This book is designed in such a way that it allows you to go through the chapters in a sequence of your choosing. This is so that you can get a feel for each chapter in its own moment; its own particular expression, cry and lesson.

It is compiled like a hip hop album, or a great love album, so it expresses itself in the same way as the songs on an album would express varying scenarios and ranges of experience and emotion – those of struggle, of love, of hurt, of regret, of betrayal, of parenthood – although, at the same time, speaking to the title.

It details different experiences, techniques and teachings pertaining to anxiety, entrepreneurship and creativity.

Introduction

Over time, our anxiety builds up; it either implodes or explodes. My anxiety has gotten me to that point several times.

I’m Tiisetso Maloma and I am an Anxious Entrepreneur. Through the years I have stumbled across, and even formulated, some anxiety-defusing techniques.

Entrepreneurship is nerve wrecking, especially when things are not going according to your plan. This is probably most of the time.

This is because entrepreneurs, rightfully so, are always focused on achieving certain goals. We pursue opportunities we have always thought to be lucrative and this creates great expectations. We pine over visions, we obsess about how to reach those goals and even go as far as imagining how many units our products will sell.

The funny thing is, nobody has control over reality and things don’t always pan out the way we had envisioned them. Subconsciously, we are shaken when our expectations are not met and this gets us anxious and at times depressed.

It should not come as a surprise that entrepreneurs are more prone to mental pains than the general population. A study entitled, "Are Entrepreneurs Touched with Fire", by Dr Michael Freeman, surveyed 242 entrepreneurs; 174 (72%) of them had mental health concerns, 118 (49%) had one or more lifelong mental health condition and 13 (5.4%) of them were suicidal – the numbers are rounded off. If you are doing the math right now, you will realise that some of them fell into all three categories. In contrast to entrepreneurs, the world’s lifetime depression prevalence, as measured by the World Health Organization, ranges from 3% to 17%.

I am the top-dog at being anxious and to make it worse, I dabble in a couple of projects all at the same time. Some call that Parallel Entrepreneurship. It is crazy. I am always anxious about multiple things.

Anxiety plays out like this…

It invades our productivity and therefore our goals. All it takes is to not see progress in a day, then a week or a month. The next thing you know, you are standing at the peak of the highest anxiety hill, depressingly recalling your record of failures and doubting your future.

Well, this book tells of several anxiety-causing incidents, set in different situations, which you are likely to relate to.

This book does not concern itself with defining anxiety or depression or any other mental disorders. It is not an academic journal either. It is fun.

It is a collection of anecdotes, emotions, feelings, frustrations and philosophies that will show you that, when anxiety is removed from your entrepreneurial process, creativity reaches its optimum.

You cannot be anxious and creative at the same time. Anxiety and creativity cannot coexist, so one must give way for the other.

Anxiety trumps creativity and creativity trumps anxiety.

The Anxious Entrepreneur is for aspiring and start-up entrepreneurs. It will get you in tune with the ventures you love and introduce you to robust ways of pursuing them. It will at best encourage you to look at new ways to deal with anxiety and at the very least provide you with some perspective.

Unintentionally, this book is also about marketing and branding, which remains a headache for entrepreneurs, especially start-ups.

It is also about:

Ways of coming up with unthought-of opportunities

Ways of coming up with unthought-of opportunities

Keeping you going with the bare essentials and making progress with limited resources

Tapping into your potential and making good ground

How to gain the hustle and refuel it

Testing business ideas without committing massive resources

How not to let the fear of ‘failure reputation’ stop and throttle you

Tactful networking

Post book-release essay: The science of cooling down your mental engine – PreFrontal Cortex – to gain creativity and productivity and lessen anxieties

I wrote this section a year post the book’s release as a blog post. I later felled compelled to include it in the book. In putting the book together, I avoided attaching scientific theories though there were those I could have attached. As a ‘creativity-versus-anxiety’ enthusiast, I kept coming across further fascinating research on the subject, and it started playing out in my mind thematically. This essay is the result of that.

Sometimes I literally can feel my mind is overworked – like a car overheating – and frustration and desperation are taking control of my mental engine.

What if like a car we could turn on an engine to cool our overworked mind – or like a computer, we can refresh and clear our mental RAM.

Anxiety Defeats Creativity – Creativity Defeats Anxiety. This is the hypothesis and subtitle to my book The Anxious Entrepreneur.

The book dances around varying stories that could render an entrepreneur anxious and gives ways of defusing the anxiety. Its thrust is that when one hustles entrepreneurially, they will most certainly on numerous