| Here is what happened on my journey so far - will try to keep it short but it might help somebody else in the same boat. I wasn't enjoying my job (as an employee) - the biggest problem I had was a nagging feeling that the people in the industry I was working in were setting an agenda that farmers would simply never be able to follow. I was actually suffering from depression but I didn't know it at the time. I had a huge argument with my boss and quit. I had been working on the product for a little while but didn't really have anything concrete. Within a couple of months of resigning I had an MVP and a co-founder. We managed to get a little VC funding and went on the startup adventure. Turned out the co-founder was a complete fraud. He was supposed to be my hardware guy (I was software) but he didn't know anything about hardware that I didn't already know. He couldn't even read a circuit diagram. I was kind of stuck at that stage, we were overseas developing the product and I thought rather stupidly I could get him to fit in doing something else. He was useless at everything. Couldn't write a program to save his life, didn't understand the product designers, couldn't help with anything. I eventually had to sideline him into doing things like grant applications and whatnot which he did manage to finish although it took a few arguments every time to get him to finish anything. I set a pretty punishing schedule for the field trials. It was a whirlwind really, lots of travel, got everything working despite having to drag that useless turd all over the place. A couple of years ago he quit and became a massive PITA while we tried to get the legal stuff sorted out to cancel his unvested shares - another long story of his stupidity and various own goals. Anyway, shortly after he quit we did have customers and revenue and it looked like it had some momentum but I contracted a little illness over that Christmas and found myself unable to get out of bed and was at divorce level with my long suffering wife. It was bad. I had contemplated steering the car over a few ravines. That undiagnosed depression took a massive hold on me. I went to the doctor who was instantly understanding of the utter despair I was in at the time. He referred me to a psychologist who set me on a path of recovery. It isn't always easy and that mood occasionally re-appears (especially after you get knocked back by another investor) but I feel like I have the tools and the understanding to keep it more or less in check. The funny thing about that period of depression was that it was the most focused and creative period of my 50 year life. I wrote some really excellent code, built an entire system from firmware up to server software and it worked the very first time we tried it on animals. The first time. An incredible achievement that I am not sure I would have been able to complete without the focus and creativity that the depression was a part of. So I'm kind of ambivalent about episodes of depression being entirely destructive, they weren't for me. |