Jason Calacanis, the founder of Weblogs, Inc., and now CEO/Founder of Mahalo, posted today about his review on stress in blogging and the NY Times “Death by Blogging” story from this past weekend.
Jason writes:
Now, the collapse of my first business was hard on me, but I knew in my heart of hearts I was a good person doing the best I could. I had family, friends, and other core activities that made me who I was and I was able to carry on. It wasn’t easy. I didn’t sleep many nights. Of course, I was also only 30 years old. If I was 30 pounds heavier (like I was when running Weblogs, Inc), wasn’t running marathons (which I stopped in 1999), and was 36 the Silicon Alley Reporter experience might have killed me, who knows. Scary thought for me, and part of the reason I’ve radically changed diet and exercise over the past couple of years.
Stress kills men. It’s a fact. An ugly but true fact.
Does this mean you have to become a hippie and leave work at 4pm to go rock climbing and not aggressively build your startup? Does this mean you can’t be a workaholic? Yes and no.
Jason goes on to share some thoughts on how to avoid stress – his own experiences with a startup that failed – and how he and others work to manage their stress.
I’ve been doing the blog / blog network thing since late 2005 – even though I did sell out and take an 18 month vacation where I did little but client work and hardly wrote even on my personal blog. And although I’ve had plenty of 18-20 hour todays during our original startup phase, I never believed that I put myself in a position where I was in that much danger of stress overload & heart related issues.
I think we each have to know our limits – and be able to work towards having the appropriate level of balance in our lives.
Indeed it does kill. And when not killing, it will make you sometimes beg for relief. Work stress takes a much larger toll on our health than we care to admit. The author is right on the money with this article. In my book, Wingtips with Spurs, I devote an entire section to the effects of stress on our mental and physical health. Not from a medical point of view but rather from the view of a human resources professional of 30 years. Stress kills and will keep killing as long as we refuse to learn the coping tools.