The pandemic affected the project I co-founded: Fuckup Inc. Now there was a group of people under my care and a global crisis unfolding.
At the end of 2019 I decided to leave architecture, which had been my professional focus for the last few years. Being an architect meant living with stress, being available 24 hours a day, normalizing little sleep and feeding yourself even worse, as if my quality as a professional depended on this.
A few months later the pandemic would arrive, and with it a love breakup. As a result of this I decided to enter a stage of reconstruction, I took up again a persistent idea of experimenting with painting. This process was accompanied by a lot of fear and uncertainty, but it would initiate a period that would become a transition period in my life.
However, with the pandemic also came a blow that structurally affected the project I co-founded with some friends: Fuckup Inc. This time of crisis led us to change the executive direction. After weighing options, I was offered the position.
I was not ready for that offer, just a few months ago my professional and personal life had completely changed. Despite my surprise and all the doubts, I accepted. Again I had a lot of fear and uncertainty. But this time, there was a group of people in my charge and a global crisis in the middle .
In November 2020 I assumed the position of CEO at Fuckup Inc.
Nowadays, stress is a kind of medal, one that we earn every day by the sweat of our brow.
When someone asks us "How are you?" many times the answer is "Very stressed, with a lot of work" and the other person's answer is "Me too" as if in that state of stress both people recognize themselves proud and worthy of belonging to the hyper productive society in which we live.
I never related stress to fear, even though at times I came to notice some similarities. That was until I listened to a podcast by Mary Poffenroth, author and researcher at the University of San Jose.
Poffenroth specializes in fear and talks about its close relationship with stress. In fact, he defines stress as a form of fear, with very similar symptoms: tension, tiredness, adrenaline, etc. What we call stress puts us in the same state we reach when we are afraid.
To speak of fear, Mary describes two types:
Factual fear: It is the one that really threatens your physical integrity, in situations of real danger. In an accident or a natural disaster, for example.
Fictitious fear: When we fear failure (like many other fears), hypothetical sensations and situations that our brain invents appear. Our daily life is full of them
Exemplifying, if you are a person who lives in a big city and you have all your needs covered, a large percentage of your fears are fictitious. If you live in a war zone, most of your fears are probably factual.
Whenever I go through a moment that I initially identify as stress and feel overwhelmed, paralyzed, nervous, etc., I try to call it by the word fear instead.
Many of the most innovative and brilliant people of our time largely use the word fear to refer to moments that the rest of us would call stress. Ed Catmull co-founder of Pixar says:
"If we're not scared, we're not doing our jobs, because we're not pushing our limits, which is key to innovating and creating."
Approaching it from creativity helps me to face them, to know the monster and make it familiar: What is that fear, what is its origin, is it something that can be solved? By substituting stress for fear we are giving more value to the concept and thus more attention to work on them and consequently continue.
One of the things that helped me make the decision to take over the management of Fuckup Inc. was a thought I had, paradoxically while I was painting. Since one of my biggest fears was that I had a team of people depending on me, I thought :
"So what if those people don't depend on me and we all depend on each other?"
It was a very crazy moment, I hadn't started yet and I already had a huge emotional load on my back. At that moment it disappeared, everything made sense to me and started what until now is the way we work. At first it was nothing more than a personal decision, where I could keep la paz to be able to operate with sanity and mental health, but then it gradually became a statement that made more and more sense to me.
How could I get to that place where we all depend on each other? The first step was to grant freedom, as much as possible, freedom of decision, action and creativity.
To make it clear and demonstrate it on a daily basis, under the premise that everyone knows more than I do in each of their areas. But this freedom was accompanied by an equal burden of responsibility, so the team received from my point of view one of the best working tools: freedom and responsibility.
From that moment on, my job became listening 80% of the time and intervening another 20% of the time, and when I say intervening I mean making some mention, some recommendation or giving some direct order depending on the context and my experience. Sometimes I give myself the freedom to veto ideas or projects that are far from our objectives. I make mistakes every day, to a greater or lesser extent, and that is part of the job, I have learned to live with the fear of making mistakes.
By understanding the relationship between fear and stress, I knew that having a more accurate understanding of reality added great value to my creative process. And when I talk about creativity, I am not only referring to that which is reflected in the so-called creative industries, such as architecture or painting, but also in positions like the one I have now, where every strategic decision is an exercise of creativity and critical thinking.
In short, fears exist to overcome them, especially if they are imaginary, and to the extent that we eliminate them through a deep and informed analysis of our reality, our life will not only be more pleasant, but also more creative.
Little by little this philosophy permeates more in the Fuckup Inc. team with the aim of establishing itself as a value and contribute to a work culture that can result in greater individual happiness, but also greater group productivity in order to change the paradigm of failure in the world.
Edited by
Ricardo Guerrero
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Let's transform our perception of failure and use it as a catalyst for growth.
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