20VC: Brad Feld, Jerry Colonna and Tracy Lawrence on Depression and Mental Health, The Dangers of Tying Happiness To Milestones & Why Fear, Anxiety and Guilt Are Useless Emotions

Every single human being on the planet is flawed. We're all flawed in different ways. We're all imperfect. This idealized state that our culture has created where you have to carry yourself and present yourself in a certain way is actually a massive inhibitor of people being effective and successful.

Stopping striving is pretty enlightening because our programming as people—and as entrepreneurs especially—is that you must constantly be striving to achieve the next goal or the next outcome. What a load of bullshit. The words themselves make me shrivel up. No, that's not the essence of it; that's the thing we're programmed to do.

It is not failure that annihilates us, but it's when we attach our sense of self-worth and self-esteem to the accomplishment of a goal and then fail to achieve the goal that we are annihilated.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

There is no correlation—zero—between happiness and achieving a milestone.

When I reflect back on my early 20s, I wish I had not linked my entire identity to my work. Linking some of my identity to my work—totally healthy. But my entire identity—not healthy for me at all.

Mental health and mental wellness are just part of our character as humans. They're not something to be ashamed or unduly burdened by in a way where you create this negative reinforcing loop that becomes a personal doom loop when you're in a depressive state and trying to be an entrepreneur or a leader and running a company.

Certainly, there are mental models of leaders out there who seem literally fearless ... The only reason you have courage is actually as a response to fear. You actually do feel fear, but there's something even more noble about overcoming that and still moving towards a goal, but it is not without fear.

The best mentorship relationships are ones that I call peer mentors—when you have a mentor-mentee relationship, but over time, you both become mentors to each other.

When I attach my sense of worthiness to something outside my inherent being, I am subject to the nauseating phenomena of riding an emotional roller coaster.