Why Do Founders Feel Lost After They Win?

Shaan Puri says that as guys get a little older and touch some success, the promise was that fears, insufficiencies, and the need for validation would be sated if the castle got big enough or the mountain climbed high enough. A lot of people arrive and find the win did not fix the problem. Something was achieved, and a much bigger challenge is waiting. The fuel source has been spent and the destination has been reached. What follows is the founder's existential crisis: where to go now, and how to get there.

He says he is pretty sure Andrew Wilkinson told him about a men's group made up exclusively of nine and 10 figure founder exit people, living in the most salubrious version of PTSD imaginable. He calls it entrepreneur PTSD. People who achieve everything encounter more challenges than beforehand because they are cast adrift, directionless and rudderless. They ask what fuel got them there, what parts of themselves they sacrificed, what calluses built up, and what coping mechanisms let them avoid things they needed to feel. With no destination left, they either get rid of the calluses, the patterns, the fears, and the insufficiencies, or they run it back with gold medalist syndrome and do it twice, because one win could have been luck.