Aaron Houghton sold his company for $169 million before age 30, then faced severe anxiety and panic attacks despite the windfall. He uses a "player vs. coach" framework to manage burnout: the player executes, the coach controls pace and delegates. He's now researching how founders handle pressure, warning that many entrepreneurs face serious mental-health risks.
I had an unlimited to-do list at all times. I felt a lot of guilt anytime I said, all right, I'm going to leave the to-do list right there for today. I'm going to pick it up tomorrow.
When I think about this problem, there are two fixes typically: an emotional fix, like what's the underlying psychology behind this? But then also the mechanical fix of how can I just look at the data and decide like what makes a good life for me? How do you think about that problem?
Yeah, I think about us as like each having both a player and a coach inside of us. The player is just the core resource, figuring out like, you know, what, what to do to fill the time to produce the output. And then the coach has kind of got like the gas pedal and the brakes and trying to figure out like, how much can I utilize this resource before I blow it up? A lot of trade-offs that are related to should I be working on this or should I delegate it are more of like coach-type decision, how I optimize my, my time on this earth a little bit with those two hats of, of that player role and the coach role.
Aaron Houghton is a serial entrepreneur who started his first business at age 17. He founded and scaled multiple tech startups, including one that he grew from just an idea to 350 employees and $50 million in annual subscription revenue and sold for $169 million before he even turned 30. Today, Aaron helps hard-charging founders and executives Live and work at their maximum capacity without burning out and is currently leading research studies on how business leaders perform under pressure.
When we sold the business, I found myself feeling like lonely was kind of the word. I was still continuing to experience anxiety, full-on, like crippling anxiety. I was so ashamed of having panic attacks as an entrepreneur. A foreign maid of mine said, "When was the last time you were really, really happy?" The answer to that question was in high school. Actually, 3 people came up to me. One of them had lost a sibling to suicide, and that sibling had been an entrepreneur. There's something really serious on the line here. Like, if I can share more of this message with more people, maybe I can help high-pressure, high-achievers try and figure out where their red line is. If you could go back and tell that guy something, 10, 15 years ago, what would it be?
