Both get a
lot of feedback, both have to test material and ideas to be successful, both
dare to do things differently, both are
creatives, both take years to be successful but for some look like ‘over
night successes’, both sometimes don’t do what they do for money – but a lot of
money goes to the few that ‘make’ it.
But there are other sadder reasons and
perhaps more poignant reasons too.
You see I know you know. Robin
Williams died yesterday. There has been much written about it and rightly so.
He was a genius, with lots of works created, some brilliant, some awful, some
strangely successful money wise but a man who suffered with depression, even
though some might say “he was the funniest man in the world.”
It is truly saddening that Robin Williams
has died, what might be more saddening is the negative social media reaction
around this which has caused his daughter Zelda
to delete her Twitter account after receiving cruel tweets following her
father's death. We can conclude we live in strange times and some
people have no respect.
But...
In the end an opportunity for goodness.
What I hope is what his death does
do is “give” us all the opportunity to be more open about depression. Especially
amongst my peer group of entrepreneurs and people who work in start ups. As in the latest Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index,
34 percent of entrepreneurs--4 percentage points more than other
workers--reported they were worried. And 45 percent of entrepreneurs said they
were stressed, 3 percentage points more than other workers. This makes
sense as they start the business, but they are also much more likely to be
depressed. As Niall Harbison*, himself a successful entrepreneur
who suffered with depression states:
“Given the huge pressure that most
founders come under during the early days of a business, it is … more likely
that they’ll get it. I didn’t know what it was before, but now I know the signs
I see it happen to people all the time. It is such a taboo subject though that
nobody ever wants to talk about it because of the fear of being seen as a
failure.”
And from a personal point of view from a social media friend of mine in
Manchester, Rachel Thompson, wrote this blog this morning saying:
“Hearing that this well-known, well-respected, genius of a
man could no longer cope with his battle spurred me to write something about my
own experiences. I’ve toyed with it for a number of months, even thinking that
it would help me to deal with my own ‘journey’ but it’s taken until this time
to finally be able to write it down.”
That blog is here and wonderful. God speed
Rachel. And again fair play for writing it – you have more guts than I…. Another
friend of mine Steve Kuncewicz who applauded Rachel today might be right in saying:
Rachel is “one of the brightest, most
able and generally brilliant people I know.” And it would seem that with genius comes depression but is it that dry
cut?
The Taboo of Depression in Startups.
With a different angle for myself,
depression is something that is finally being “called out” in the
entrepreneurial community. Finally! As reported only a month ago , in this award
winning blog “The Psychological Price of Entrepreneurship.”
As the author brilliantly puts it:
“No one said building a company
was easy. But it's time to be honest about how brutal it really is--and the
price so many founders secretly pay.”
And she sadly reports: “Not everyone who walks through darkness makes it out. In January, well-known founder Jody Sherman, 47, of the e-commerce site Ecomom took his own life. His death shook the start-up community. It also reignited a discussion about entrepreneurship and mental health that began two years earlier after the suicide of Ilya Zhitomirskiy, the 22-year-old co-founder of Diaspora, a social networking site.”
The Danger of the Mad Genius:
Many of these founders were known for their brilliance but perhaps
by associating depression with brilliance we do the disease an injustice.
Perhaps Mary
Hamilton** in the Guardian put it best, as someone who has also suffered
with the disease, that:
“The flip side of the media response is a slew of articles
tying Williams’ comedic genius inextricably to his depression and struggles
with addiction. But he was brilliant despite his mental illness, not because of
it….. without his brilliance, the madness would remain, and without his
madness, the brilliance might have shone so much more brightly…..There is a
strange ambiguity about the “mad genius” narrative that feeds into anxieties
about getting treatment. What if, without the depression, I am no longer me?
What if I lose my creative spark?”
Perhaps this is what happened to Robin
(Mr Williams); perhaps this is what happens to some founders of businesses such
as Ben
Huh, the CEO of the Cheezburger Network humor websites, Sean Percival, a former
MySpace vice president and co-founder of the children's clothing start-up
Wittlebee, penned a piece called "When It's Not All Good, Ask for
Help" on his website.
And Brad Feld, a
managing director of the Foundry Group, states after his blog on his depression
received hundreds of positive emails, from people as he says were:
“Very successful people, very visible, very charismatic--yet
they've struggled with this silently. There's a sense that they can't talk
about it, that it's a weakness or a shame or something. They feel like they're
hiding, which makes the whole thing worse."
Perhaps they don’t go for help
believing that this is something that makes them, rather than breaks them. I
know from experience that working with start ups their founders can have as John Gartner,
a practicing psychologist who teaches at Johns Hopkins University Medical
School says:
"If you're manic, you think you're Jesus," says Gartner.
"If you're hypomanic, you think you're God's gift to technology investing.
We're talking about different levels of grandiosity but the same
symptoms."
Symptoms that I also share, that many entrepreneurs share, as John
Gartner concludes in his book, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (a Little)
Craziness and (a Lot of) Success in America, , this tendency in the
“often-overlooked temperament--hypomania--may be responsible for some
entrepreneurs' strengths as well as their flaws.”
But perhaps you can or should have one without the other as Mary
states. So to answer my blogs original question.
What do stand up comedians have in common with entrepreneurs?
More than we might like to think about. For reasons that aren't not worth joking about.
-----------
References:
*Niall Harbison himself is a Irish entrepreneur who co-founded Simply
Zesty and is now CEO of PR Slides. His book Get Sh*t Done was
published in June 2014.
**
A version of this article originally appeared at maryhamilton.co.uk
