But, this is not the only thing that changed ever since I started the company. I changed on many levels. To name just three most important changes that I noticed:

1. Regulating Emotions.

I am better at regulating my emotions, no doubt about it. I used to be a neurotic person, but now, I have a good mood most of the time. In particular, I noticed one substantial change.

Namely, I used to cry when something bad was happening. Now, I cry whenever something particularly good happens instead.

2. Who Has Time For Complaining Anymore?

Entrepreneurship puts you out of your comfort zone, big time. You suddenly become non-fungible, as you need to show up no matter what. According to Duckworth et al.

(2007), this kind of everyday perseverance predicts achievement beyond talent. If you get a paid gig such as a talk or a workshop, would you call it off just because you woke up with a cold in the morning?

As a graduate student, I called off quite a few seminars just because I felt ill. Sometimes, it was the flu.

And sometimes, I felt ill just because I didn’t feel prepared well enough and because stress tormented my stomach. In either case, I was stepping back from public presentations.

What Changed When I Had No Choice?

Now, since I have no choice, all of a sudden I never get sick! Or, even if I feel a little ill, then still, in presence of adrenaline my body gets disciplined for a few hours so that I can proceed with a presentation without showing signs of illness.

Standing against the wall is sometimes the best remedy for feeling blue. I noticed that this year when the Dutch society got utterly apathetic after over a year of lockdown.

Most people were so discouraged from doing yet anything that they were not even responding to messages anymore. They couldn’t see that once you don’t respond to other people’s emails, you pull them down together with you.

As a result, depression spread across Dutch society even faster than the virus. According to BMC Public Health, a simulation study modeling the Dutch population found that the prevalence of depressive symptoms rose from about 3.5% at baseline to nearly 11% during the 2020–21 lockdown period. Well, as a self-employed person, I simply couldn’t afford passiveness.

Business is based on relations, and once your fridge is empty, you have no choice but to act. As a result, I was one of the few people in my network who exhibited initiative and actively contacted others despite the overall apathy around me.

Smile!

I also see myself smiling more often than before. After launching a YT channel, I finally noticed that I simply have a resting bitch face. I am also simply happier than before.

Of course, new problems have arisen in the meantime. But at the same time, some problems and blockades that I had before have disappeared.

The mistakes I commit now are my own mistakes – no one can block my career or creativity anymore. That’s a huge advantage!

I also have to take care of myself more, for example, taking cold showers to prevent illness and potential downtime. I cannot afford longer breaks in my professional activities.

So I’ve taken better care of my health, from exercise to diet. As a result, I lost over 20 kilos of body weight in two years.

Lastly, I noticed some signs of reverse ageing. Eight years ago, after my wedding was called off, my hair turned white and stayed like that for years. I heard that greying hair is reversible, but I didn’t believe it—until I saw it to my very eyes.

I still have some dark-grey hair on my head, but it is way less visible than before. All the white hair has completely disappeared in the past two years. And I am hopeful that the grey hair will slowly disappear.

3. Better Communication Strategies.

As a young girl, I used to have horrible ways of communicating. It might be partly due to the Polish culture where people—and, especially, women. Are prompted to not openly share their thoughts and intentions.

Or even, to pose for someone else than they are. Quite naturally, this led to many misunderstandings and disappointments in the process.

The more I used to pretend that everything was ok with my life and the less I used to share about my needs, the more I was falling down the rabbit hole. And, these mistakes didn’t end in my teenage years. Even as a 30-year-old grad school student, I still used to make assumptions about what people know about me and what is or isn’t obvious. 

Now I have a company, I don’t make any assumptions anymore—I just say what I have on my mind. And it has nothing to do with the “life is short” philosophy. I just know that people are not mind-readers and that the more precise information you give about what you need, the more likely you are to get precisely what you want.

I think that looking back, and searching for clients for my products and services taught me how to communicate precisely. After all, you need to figure out what others need at the moment, find your potential clients, and explain to them how your solution solves their problems.

Becoming a Practical Person.

As an example, I recently did something that would be unthinkable to me just three or five years ago. Namely, instead of walking in the dark while looking for a partner—daydreaming, using random strategies like logging into dating sites where a probability of finding someone is lower than walking down the street and randomly smiling at people, or falling into the common BS narrative that living a big city life as a single person is cool—I used logic.

I knew that,

(1) to figure out if a person meets this criterion, you need to know them well for at least a few months. This might mean that I don’t have enough time in my lifetime to find such a person while getting to meet them one by one,

(2) the pooled number of people known by my direct friends is two orders of magnitude higher than the number of people I know,

(3) my perception of people might be subjective, as visual cues and first impressions might mislead me. According to a study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, appearance-based first impressions are surprisingly unreliable predictors of a person’s actual character. So, sometimes it is good to listen to those who have no physical attraction toward a person,

(4) some of my friends are hubs in places full of intelligent people such as Google. Plus, while I am professionally occupied with writing texts of all kinds, at hubs such as Google, they are professionally occupied with developing new searching algorithms.

How Did the Practical Approach Work Out?

Given all that, I simply conceptualized what I wanted to find in a person. I wrote it down in a form of a 7-page text trying to be as precise as possible.

And I activated my friends to look for a person that would fit the description. This, obviously, goes way against the Polish culture (that would make you ashamed of taking such an open approach) but not against the entrepreneurial culture at all. 

Quite as expected, my conventional approach didn’t make anyone laugh. But rather the opposite – it led to many interesting happenings in my life.

Just for the records, I placed this description HERE. As long as I am not married, the case is open I guess :)

4. Managing Expectations.

Now I have my own company, I am also way better at forgiving people than before. I see that they usually have better intentions than they seem at first.

I also noticed that social capital is so important for long-term development that I simply cannot afford not to recuperate with people I used to have conflicts with. You never know what the future brings.

According to Granovetter (1973), even weak ties are where new opportunities most often come from. So not shaking hands and not saying “sorry” is the stupidest thing you can possibly do.

Also, use more heuristics than before. Instead of asking one person a favor and hoping that they will meet the expectations, I ask many people at a time and hope that some percentage will respond.

I only care about my goals. So I don’t have time for hatching resentment that a specific person didn’t help me at a specific time.

No need to say that with this rule in mind, my relations with people got to a whole new level.