All you can do right now is focus on the things you can control.
Most of the world is in lock down, which is crucial to keep vulnerable people safe. Anxiety is through the roof. The natural state is to allow the “issue” to take up 95% of your brain and to fully embrace a state of panic. I’ve definitely had moments of this in the past few days.
But, I’ve had to reel myself back and think about the other times I’ve dealt with high levels of anxiety — 9/11, parental illness and loss, a cancer diagnosis. The key, each time, to my keeping my sanity has been to focus a majority of my brain on the things I can control.
To do that, I structure the shit out of it. Our work lives and our home lives have a structure, rhythm, and flow. I am trying to continue that while being trapped in one location.
Spero Ventures has been WFH since March 3rd. We cancelled an event that was scheduled for that day and encouraged people to stay safe.
While we are working from home and all of our “meetings” are on video, everything else is the same.
- We are still investing. We closed on an investment today.
- We are still looking for new investments. We are meeting founders on Zoom.
- We are still doing regular calls with our portfolio and focusing on how to get through this time.
- We are even doing our events. They just happen to be on Zoom. Later this week, we will announce a Zoom call for anyone who is interested in or building a community around our Product-Led Community thesis. Follow me on Twitter to hear about the announcement.
Personally, I am:
- Keeping to my regular working schedule. Doing all meetings at my desk at home instead of my desk at work or at founder offices.
- Making sure the kids have structure for their online learning — no PJs all day!
- Making sure I meditate. I’ve been using Core several times a day – here are the results of my mediation from this morning
- Doing PT for my knee (ski accident, ugh)
- Working on things that get me into the flow state – this is awesome because the anxiety is not front and center when this happens.
One upside to having four people locked in the house is that I don’t have to uber my kids anywhere. That is free time that I can use to re-engage with things that give me joy.
My plan is to upgrade the internals of my old (2008) Mac Pro, set up a central photo database, and start editing again. I’m going to try to get Final Cut Pro X up and running and recut a film I made in 2012 that may be festival worthy.
Even writing this made me realize there is a lot that I can control. My hope is that focusing on this gets me through the next few weeks and months.
I will leave you with this perspective-setting paragraph from Rebecca Solnit’s book A Paradise Built in Hell:
In some of the disasters of the 20th century—the big northeastern blackouts in 1965 and 2003, the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area, 2005’s Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast—the loss of electrical power meant that the light pollution blotting out the night sky vanished. In these disaster-struck cities, people suddenly found themselves under the canopy of stars still visible in small and remote places. On the warm night of August 15, 2003, the Milky Way could be seen in New York City, a heavenly realm long lost to view until the blackout that hit the northeast late that afternoon. You can think of the current social order as something akin to this artificial light: another kind of power that fails in disaster. In its place appears a reversion to improvised, collaborative, cooperative and local society. However beautiful the stars of a suddenly visible night sky, few nowadays could find their way by them, but the constellations of solidarity, altruism and improvisation are within most of us and reappear at these times. People know what to do in a disaster. The loss of power, the disaster in the modern sense, is an affliction, but the reappearance of these old heavens is its opposite. This is the paradise entered through hell.