What Mindfulness Taught Me About Building a Startup

I'm a mindfulness teacher, and I'm also a startup founder — and as it happens, the work my company TreeholeHK does is precisely to promote mindfulness. I've always believed that uniting knowledge and action matters, and that mindfulness is more than a practice for feeling "a little happier" — so throughout the journey of building a business, I've often wondered what wisdom in mindfulness might apply to running a company. What follows are a few stray reflections that have come to me over these past several months.

The first is about facing difficulty. I once heard David Yeung, the founder of Green Common, share that in startups things rarely go to plan — and I couldn't agree more. In its early days TreeholeHK had no money, no network, and my own background gave it no professional community to lean on. On top of that, Hong Kong pays little attention to mental health in general, as though looking after your mental health were only for people who already have a problem. With so many factors stacked against it, the going has been very hard for TreeholeHK. Every morning I wake up worrying about turnout at events, about personal and partnership income, about the company's prospects — and most nights I'm thinking about the same things before sleep. Some TreeholeHK events have drawn a healthy response, but others have fallen far short of expectations, and as the person responsible, I can't help feeling that disappointment to one degree or another.

Hm — what do these setbacks have to do with mindfulness? In fact, the setbacks a company faces have a great deal in common with the setbacks an individual faces. Before I learned mindfulness, it was easy to let negative emotions define who I was — to assume that having negative emotions meant I had failed as a person, and so to strain to chase every negative feeling away. Once mindfulness let me observe that emotions come and go of their own accord, I stopped clinging so tightly to controlling them. And is running a company really any different? Especially for a fledgling business, setbacks far outnumber smooth stretches; if you threw in the towel at the first obstacle, you probably shouldn't be doing a startup at all. Just as with emotions, rather than insisting there be no setbacks, it's better to see setbacks as an inevitable part of building a business, and to put your energy into responding to them well.

The second is about my state of mind at work. A startup demands self-discipline; at times the work leaves no room to breathe, but for me the idle hours after a busy stretch are harder to face. Most of my friends my age have thrown themselves into careers, heads down and hard at it every single day. By comparison, an empty afternoon feels like a mirror held up to my own idleness. I get the sense I always have to find something to do just to justify my decision to turn down a job offer and start a company, and sometimes that very thought builds into enormous pressure. But take a step back and think: isn't mindfulness precisely about training yourself to live in the present, rather than forever chasing after a goal? TreeholeHK's growth may not be fast, but it's still on track, and there's no need to make any drastic change of direction in the short term. So sometimes, when there's nothing to do, shouldn't I instead put my attention into rest and enjoyment, rather than living a life of endless toil and busyness?

Participants often share with me how they struggle with the things that matter most in their lives, and what they find most stressful isn't necessarily a heavy workload but the way work occupies their minds at every moment, on the clock or off it, their heads always still at work – a phenomenon most entrepreneurs will feel deeply. I teach them mindfulness so that when they work, they work, and when they rest, they rest. I suppose that principle applies to me too: how can I teach people to use mindfulness against the pressures of work if I'm under the pressure of mindfulness myself? Sometimes, eating a snack while fretting over running an event, I'll suddenly come back to its springy bite and savoury aroma, and realise that human happiness really doesn't take much – just cutting out the junk food, and a mind that lives in the present.