Thoughts on innovation, strategy, and life
The world lost a treasure when Kobe Bryant tragically died in January. Kobe’s book The Mamba Mentality is a fascinating look at his work ethic, worldview, and clear thought process. I can’t even imagine the future writing he would have been capable of had he lived longer. Here are The Mamba Mentality Key Takeaways.
I wrote a tribute to Kobe while lying awake in bed the night of his death, which you can read here.
Continue reading “The Mamba Mentality Key Takeaways”Last week, Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers signed the largest contract in NFL history, worth up to $180 million over the next six years, with about $70 million being paid out by March 2019. As a Packers fan, it’s a relief to know that Rodgers is signed until he’s 40. At the same time, reading the specifics and comments about the contract got me thinking about what it means to be the “highest paid” person on a team, in a league, or even within a company.
Being the highest paid is, in large part, not a function of your financial needs but instead a recognition that you are the “most valuable” player on the team or in your industry. It’s also a function of what the competition is paying for similar players – it is no accident that Rodgers’ contract came mere months after Kirk Cousins’ record-setting $84 million, three year contract.
But there is a flip side to being paid the most. The highest paid person on the team – whether the quarterback, the star basketball player, or the CEO – will also be the first one blamed if things take a turn for the worse. Compensation and blame are two sides of the same coin. You can bet that if the Packers have a bad season, commentators and fans will be blaming Aaron Rodgers’ contract for the team’s lack of talent.
Everything else being equal, we’re all trying to make as much money as we can. But it’s important to recognize that the more you get paid, the more you’ll be blamed if things go badly. And this is a fair, reasonable, and ethical reaction – and an essential point of Nassim Taleb’s Skin in the Game.
Anger over executive compensation happens most often when there is a separation between compensation and an executive’s skin in the game. This anger is most obvious when the CEO of a badly performing company makes millions of dollars, despite their lackluster results. Most of us don’t have much issue with Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk being billionaires – they took enormous personal risks to build their respective companies. On the other hand, most people would have problems with a Congressperson becoming a billionaire while in office.
Of course, this rule doesn’t just apply to CEOs and quarterbacks. It’s true at all levels, whether you’re a team lead at a software company or a store manager at McDonald’s. Being compensated better automatically means you will have a greater share of the blame if your team performs badly. And that’s how it should be.
The optionality trap starts when we’re young:
“Get good grades in school. You’ll have more options when choosing a college.” -Parents
“Pick a major that applies to many different industries. That way you’ll have more job options.” -College Counselor
“Consulting is a great field. From there, you can do whatever you want.” -Career Advisor
While this advice isn’t necessarily wrong, very rarely do we take a step back and examine what exactly we’re collecting all these options for. Perhaps at the beginning of our careers, we have some vague idea of a goal or accomplishment we want to reach but we’re not quite sure: a) how to reach the goal and b) if we even want to reach the goal in the first place. So naturally we choose the path that keeps the maximum number of future possibilities available to us. Unfortunately, this fuzzy goal mindset is often carried through to adulthood and leaves us grasping for optionality with all of our major life decisions. And over the course of a lifetime, this optionality maximization mentality turns us into habitual option collectors and prevents us from reaching our goals.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start with the basics.
Last week, I had the opportunity to give a talk on product innovation at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising (FIDM). While I think they called me in to share some of the things I’ve learned during my time consulting to The Estee Lauder Companies, it’s hard to say who got more value out of the talk: the students or me.
I’ve switched industries a lot in my (admittedly) short career. Over the past few years, I’ve worked in higher education, early education, ad tech SaaS, cosmetics, and alcohol. Because of that frequent switching, I’ve often been a beginner and forced to get up to speed in new industries quickly. However, during the Q&A portion of the talk at FIDM, I realized I had stopped looking at the cosmetics industry through a beginner’s eyes. The students (all of whom were about 20 years old) were asking questions about the industry, sales channels, and technology from angles I had never thought of but seemed obvious as soon as they brought them up.
For example: among millennials, beauty influencers have huge power to drive sales, simply by recommending a product or featuring it in a makeup tutorial video. Several students brought up the (valid) point of diminishing consumer trust in influencers because of all the undisclosed sponsored posts. In hindsight, this concern seems obvious but in all my time working with beauty brands, this point has either been completely avoided or jokingly brushed off. Yet these students were able to very easily see the long-term consequences of the current influencer trend: diminished consumer trust. Instead of working with influencers or celebrities, these students were interested in figuring out how to build better peer-to-peer recommendation systems that start and end with product effectiveness in a personalized way and can’t be gamed by larger brands. Amazing concept!
What surprised me the most about the FIDM Q&A session is how unaware I was of losing my “beginner’s mind“. I’ve only been in the beauty industry for two and a half years – which is nothing if you compare it to colleagues who’ve been doing this for twenty or thirty years. But those two years were more than enough to make me miss obvious concerns with the current trendy marketing strategy. This brings up an important question: at what point do people lose their “beginner’s mind” and is it possible to keep this creative state of mind for longer periods of time?
At this point, I don’t quite know what the best solution is but I suspect it has something to do with continually exposing yourself to others without much experience and limiting your interactions with so-called “experts”. While I’m sure there’s some value in having deep knowledge within a specific field, it certainly does seem like the more time you spend working on a given problem, the more difficult it is to see the tangential opportunities that might be obvious to a beginner.
I’ll be exploring this beginner/expert dichotomy further in future posts but in the meantime, let me know your thoughts or experiences with the beginner’s mind on Twitter or in the comments!
Staying in shape, mentally and physically, is obviously important to overall well-being. Personally, I find my mind is sharper and more importantly, I’m a much happier person when I take care of myself physically.
Since last April, I’ve been traveling a ton for my consulting work, typically somewhere between 2-3 weeks every month. Traveling is something I love so I can’t complain too much about that buuuut it certainly makes staying in shape difficult. Before this travel madness started, I had a regular gym routine (3-4 days of lifting weights, 2-3 days of cardio) but that’s difficult to keep up when you’re in a different place almost every week.
Over the past few months, I’ve learned a lot about staying in shape while traveling. As is usually the case with me, most of these lessons were learned the hard way:
Free hotel breakfasts are almost always god-awful, especially if you’re staying at a road warrior hotel, like Homewood Suites or Residence Inn. Tell me if this sounds familiar: Soggy, somewhat rubbery scrambled eggs, breakfast potatoes that taste like they’ve been out for weeks, and some strange processed meat as a side.
Oh, I forgot about the waffle maker.
Do yourself a favor and skip most of that. Maybe grab some eggs and toast if you’re really hungry. But probably the safest items to consume in a hotel breakfast are the coffee, tea, and juice. With all the other stuff, you’re going to be consuming amounts of sodium and sugar that’ll leave you feeling exhausted for the rest of the day.
So if you’re not going to eat breakfast at the hotel, what can you eat?
Grocery stores are amazing places. Even in the middle of nowhere, you can find a grocery store that sells healthy food. My advice is to go to a grocery store the day you arrive and pick up a few things. Obviously food choices are somewhat dependent on whether your hotel room has a fridge/microwave. Here’s what I typically buy, assuming there’s a fridge:
That sounds like a solid breakfast to me.
This is a concept I try to use all the time, not just when I’m traveling but it’s even more important on the road. The idea is this: if you have to do something, for example, go from the ground floor of the hotel to the 4th floor, there are two options available to you:
Option 1: Take the elevator
Option 2: Walk up the stairs
Even though option 2 is more energy intensive, it’ll take you to the same place as the elevator, you’ll burn a few calories, and you’ll probably save yourself the stress of waiting for an elevator that takes forever and the awkwardness of being in an elevator. Related question: aren’t elevators just the most awkward places ever?
Another great form of free exercise if you’re in a city is just walking to meetings instead of taking an Uber or cab.
Let’s face it: hotel gyms leave a lot to be desired. That said, there are some great workouts which don’t require any equipment and can be done in your hotel room (like this and this). Start doing them regularly when you’re on the road and add your own variations to keep it interesting. The easiest exercises to do in a hotel room, no matter what size, are:
On a related note, if you’re on the road regularly, it’s easy to get into a routine of laying on your couch and watching Netflix when you’re home. I love Netflix as much as the next person but make sure you squeeze in some “real gym” time when you’re home. A real gym is a place that has barbells, plates, machines, and space.
If I get home before 8pm from a trip, I try to squeeze in a short, gym session the same evening.
One great thing about work travel is being able to expense your meals. That’s amazing right?! Well, yes and no.
The good news is that you can take advantage of being in a new place and try types of cuisine and restaurants you typically wouldn’t go to. In some industries (like the one I’m working in now), work travel can also entail fancy dinners which gives you an opportunity to try more upscale restaurants you probably wouldn’t choose on your own.
The downside? Well, all those meals might be covered by your company/client but that doesn’t mean the calories don’t count. Just because dessert is covered doesn’t mean you should get dessert.
Remember the “freshman 15” from college? (I do…) You see a similar effect among new consultants for a very similar reason. I remember when I first started college, the “coolest” thing was being able to drink soda with every meal. A few months later, despite being a college athlete, I had gained 15 pounds and it was pretty obvious that the soda needed to go. Don’t make the same mistake as 18-year-old Neil.: try to eat the same way on the road as you’d eat at home.
But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t enjoy the perks of going to fancy restaurants! Just be smart about it.
For someone who travels a lot, I still haven’t learned how to properly sleep in hotel rooms. Almost without fail, I find it difficult to fall asleep the first night I’m in a new hotel room. Knowing that allows me to plan for it. Most nights I sleep for about 7 hours so on my first night in a new room, I’ll try to budget 8-9 hours for sleep, which gives me some time to toss and turn and still get a normal amount of sleep. It doesn’t always work but it helps.
Skimping on sleep is a great way to get sick while traveling – probably the worst possible combination.
Related to the above, drinking alcohol affects your quality of sleep and can also contribute to getting sick. If your travel requires you to fly, keep in mind that planes dehydrate you so drinking alcohol before, during, or immediately after a flight can be rough on your system (and on your skin). If you do choose to drink, just try to balance each drink with a glass of water and you should be able to avoid dehydration.
And yes, I learned this lesson in the worst possible way by going out in SF the night before a 6:30am flight (what the hell was I thinking?). Next time we’re in the same city, ask me for the story.
If you haven’t heard of StandStand before, you need to check it out. Basically it’s a portable standing desk made of a three interlocking pieces of wood. Great product that travels nicely in a laptop bag.
Especially after sitting for a while in a plane/train, working on a standing desk instead of sitting down feels amazing. Trust me.
Traveling for work can sometimes (or usually) be rough but being smart about how you travel, eat, and move while on the road makes all the difference between a miserable trip and a productive one. I’ve been on both sides of the productive/miserable spectrum and believe me when I say the productive side is a lot more fun. Let me know if you have any other suggestions for staying in shape while traveling – I’d love to try it out.
On the surface of it, selling something is pretty weird. You’re basically using words, Jedi mind tricks, and (occasionally twisted) logic to convince someone that they should do something, which usually consists of them giving you money.
Oh and if you’re about to skip this post because you’re not a “salesperson”, let me ask you something: have you ever had a job interview? Have you ever pitched an idea? Have you ever asked your teacher for a deadline extension? Yea…you’re a salesperson. Don’t be ashamed, we’re all salespeople. Own it.
So if we absolutely have to do the uncomfortable act of selling something, we might as well do a good job right? The art of selling is first and foremost about confidence. If you don’t believe in what you’re selling, you can be damn sure no one else will either. Salespeople require a similar level of unshakeable confidence as athletes do and just like athletes, salespeople tend to have a “sales prep routine” to get into the right sales mindset. Here’s one that works for me:
Step 1: Watch these 2 videos (language NSFW) featuring Vin Diesel and Ben Affleck from the movie Boiler Room. Awesome demonstrations of sales techniques in here too:
Best quote from these videos: “There is no such thing as a no sales call. A sale is made on every call you make. Either you sell the client some stock or he sells you on a reason he can’t. Either way a sale is made”. Word.
Step 2: Review your plan – why should this person give you what you want?
I’m not a big believer in sales scripts. In my opinion, scripts are a great way to make yourself seem robotic and unlikeable (unless you know the script really, really well – so well that it’s second nature and you don’t have to think about it). That said, it’s still important to have a gameplan in place – where do you want the conversation to go, how you want it to flow, and what you want them to do. Most importantly, you have to be able to answer the question: why should the other person do what you want them to do?
Step 3: Review objections – why would someone say no to what you’re selling?
Inevitably when selling, someone is going to say no to you. The key is how you handle their objections. Obviously you need to know what the objection is in order to respond to it and improve in the future, so make sure you make the effort to find out. It amazes me how many people take “no” at face value in the sales process and completely miss the opportunity to iterate on their product/pitch. By understanding objections, at the very least you know what you can improve for next time. And yes, you should be writing these objections down.
Step 4: Watch Alec Baldwin motivate you to sell in Glengarry Glen Ross (language NSFW)
Remember: Always be closing!
On a more serious note though, the AIDA (Attention, Interest, Decision, Action) framework that Baldwin talks about is really, really effective. Learn it and use it.
Step 5: Go make the sale
You got this. Have fun with it – what’s the worst that’s gonna happen? They say no? Their loss.
Step 6: Drink some coffee (because coffee’s for closers only)
If you want to go deeper into learning sales skills, I highly, highly recommend buying Jeffrey Gitomer’s Sales Bible book and getting tons of real life practice. There aren’t any shortcuts to getting good at this stuff. It just takes confidence and hard work.
I’ve been noodling on a theory for awhile related to mental toughness. The theory is this: There‘s a huge difference in mental strength between those who’ve been “failure-tested” and those who haven’t. Failure-tested is a bit of a vague term so let me explain what I mean before diving in further.
When I say failure-tested, I’m not just talking about someone who has started a company and failed. That’s just one example. It can also include people who’ve gone through devastating injuries or accidents, recovered from an addiction, gone through a divorce, or any number of tragedies. The key to being failure-tested is not the event that constitutes “failure”, but the effect the event has on personal identity.
For example, when a football player gets an ACL tear and has to sit out for 12 months, are they still a football player? Of course they are but 12 months of not doing what you think you were born to do can shatter personal identity. If someone’s personal identity revolves around a company they started and that company fails, their personal identity is destroyed. The same thing happens if they self-identify as a husband and their marriage dissolves. My hypothesis is that true failure (and the negative mental effects associated with it, like depression) only occurs when someone’s personal identity is destroyed.
I started thinking about this as I read Sam Sheridan’s excellent books on martial arts: A Fighter’s Heart and The Fighter’s Mind. Sam talks about how the best thing about MMA (mixed martial arts) is that it allows you to use whatever style you want, from muay thai, to kung fu, to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and see if you can make your opponent “submit” (AKA “tap” or quit). When someone submits in MMA, the fight is over. It’s great because it makes it more unlikely for serious injuries to occur (since you have the option of quitting) but to a fighter, the act of submitting means that your opponent has total power over you – they could kill you, if it were a street fight.
When someone is forced to submit during an actual MMA fight, it can shatter the fighter’s world view and make it nearly impossible to get back in the cage, which by definition, requires you to think you can win. Yet unlike boxing, most of the best MMA fighters aren’t undefeated, so how is that possible? The answer is that these top fighters can take the mental beatdown that comes with failure, pick themselves back up, and improve for next time. It’s more than simply getting back up – these fighters actually get better after these losses. The losses push them further for next time.
How does this all tie into someone being failure-tested? When someone has experienced the pain that comes with their personal identity being shattered and comes back from it to take another shot at life, they’ve been failure-tested. I’ve noticed this a ton in the startup world – founders who’ve failed and try again are often some of the most mentally tough people in the industry (and most of them have failed at some point). You may argue with his methods but Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is a great example of this. At one point before Uber, “Kalanick was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and sleeping in his parents’ house”. Uber is not Kalanick’s first company and he has definitely been failure-tested, probably in more ways than we are even aware of.
An even better example than Kalanick: When Elon Musk was at Paypal, he couldn’t afford an apartment so he lived in the office and showered at the local YMCA. Unrelated tangent: I used to work out at that same YMCA when I lived in the Bay Area (not during the same time period obviously). The trials for Musk didn’t end there though. He later invested ~100% of his (now massive) net worth into Tesla and SpaceX. At one point, he had to borrow money from friends to pay rent, despite being mega-rich on paper because Tesla couldn’t make payroll unless he put in his last $3 million into the company. Talk about being failure-tested – his life could’ve been a rags-to-riches-to-rags story. Instead, he’s now one of the most accomplished human beings of all time.
It’s no coincidence that there’s a large number of successful people who went through rough childhoods. Those early experiences shaped the way they would respond to difficulty for their lives.
So how does all this apply to you? There’s a lot I could say about this but overall it all sums up to one thing: take risks and put yourself in a position where you’re testing yourself. This all depends on you but could include things like:
Yes, trying something new and testing yourself is going to feel awful….at first. Pretty quickly though, you’ll get used to it. Being frustrated is a great sign that you’re out of your comfort zone and on your way to growth.
I think there’s a lot more to say about this topic in many different areas – especially hiring and personal relationships but I’ll save that for future posts. This is already too long (that’s what she said….).
“Why didn’t they run it from the 1 with Marshawn?”
It’s something nearly everyone has wondered aloud in the past few days. For those of you who’ve been living under a rock, here’s what happened: the Patriots had a monstrous comeback in the 4th quarter to go up by 4. The Seahawks then stormed down the field thanks to some crazy plays like this one. They were down 4, had the ball at the 1 yard line with 1 timeout, 26 seconds to go, and had the best running back in the league in their backfield. On the next play, they decided to pass, it was intercepted and that sealed the game. The Patriots won, Tom Brady/Bill Belichick get their 4th title, and the Seahawks are left wondering what happened.
For most of us, having anything like that happen, let alone on the world’s biggest stage, would be absolutely devastating. What shocked me the most since then, is Russell Wilson’s reaction. Here’s a quote from his press conference on Tuesday (less than 48 hours after the game was over):
“I always kind of write down stuff and I wrote down this, ‘Let’s keep the focus on the future, not what’s behind.’ I think that’s a really, really important thought in terms of staying positive. What can I do for the next opportunity that I have? What can I learn? Good or bad — if we had won the Super Bowl or if we had lost in the fashion that we had. I would still be thinking the same way and I think keeping that consistent approach to life in general and this is a lot bigger than obviously, losing the game is tough but any life circumstance — losing my dad. What do I do next? How can I learn from the lessons of losing him? And obviously losing a game is completely different than losing a family member. Those are the type of things that I think about. That’s how I try to prepare my mind for the next opportunity that I have — the next thing that I have in my life that comes up.”
That’s an incredible quote, especially given the circumstances. He doesn’t throw his coaches under the bus. He doesn’t blame anything on his receiver (even though analysts say the receiver deserved a lot of the blame on that play). He looks at what he can learn and how he can apply it to future situations. I don’t know about you but when the Packers lost to the Seahawks a couple weeks ago (a game I wasn’t playing in, in case you were wondering), it took me a good ten days to even want to think about football again. And I’m just a fan! Wilson is already looking at what he can learn, less than 48 hours after what will surely be one of the biggest missed opportunities of his career. His capacity to handle adversity and learn from it has just left me in awe since reading that quote yesterday.
Dealing with adversity is something I’ve been trying to work on over the past few months. Packers game aside, one thing that’s been helpful is Stoicism. There’s probably a super technical definition of Stoicism online somewhere but essentially what it teaches is that we can’t control external events or the results of our actions. We can only control the actions we make and our reactions to external events. What this philosophical belief system results in is doing the best you can and then letting the chips fall as they may. There’s a lot more to it but that’s the gist. It’s been amazing in delivering peace of mind so far but clearly, I have a long way to go in my understanding and practice of Stoicism.
I have no idea if Russell Wilson considers himself Stoic or not but he’s been doing a great job of demonstrating the ideals over the past few days. His post-game reaction has shown me how much further I have to go in my ability to handle the ups and downs of my life, which are quite honestly nothing compared to what an NFL quarterback faces. And in turn, the pressure an NFL QB faces is fun and games (literally) compared to what someone living in poverty or under the rule of ISIS would face every single day. It’s all about perspective.
By the way, if you want to read more about Stoicism, definitely check out Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. If you read that and enjoy it, then pick up Letters From A Stoic by Seneca and The Discourses by Epictetus. And in case you thought all Stoics are ancient, some modern stoics include Bill Clinton, Arianna Huffington, and Ryan Holiday.
The thing that impresses me the most about successful people is the sheer volume and quality of their work. How can someone accomplish so much in the same 24 hour days that you and I have?
Who are some of these people I’m so impressed with? Well how about Ryan Holiday, who was simultaneously Marketing Director at American Apparel, blogging extensively, and writing high quality books. Or James Altucher, who has started multiple successful companies, ran a hedge fund, spilled his soul on his personal blog, wrote several of books, runs a very successful podcast, and is also an angel investor. Or my good friend Justin Mares, who simultaneously scaled Airbrake as Director of Revenue (which led to an acquisition by Rackspace) and co-wrote Traction (which I highly recommend by the way). People like Ryan, James, and Justin inspire me.
I try not to even think about the productivity required by Elon Musk, who is CEO of both Tesla Motors and SpaceX. He’s Iron Man though so I guess he doesn’t count.
So how are these people so productive? Here is what I’ve observed:
Here’s some simple math: if someone has just 1 more hour of productivity per day than the average person, at the end of the year, they’ll have 365 hours of extra work. After 10 years, that’s 3650 extra hours. Over a 30 year career, they have a 10,950 hour advantage. According to Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, 10,000 hours of practice is the key to mastery so based on the math, someone with an extra hour per day will be a master of 1 more skill than the average person. If that skill is something valuable – you can see why that makes a difference. I would make the argument that highly productive individuals actually have a 4-5 hour per day advantage over the average person, which would mean mastery of an additional skill happens in 6-8 years instead of 30. While I’m not a huge fan of Gladwell’s work and disagree on a few things, the conclusion is the same: the extra hours compound into a real advantage over time.
This is one of my favorite topics to learn more about so if you’ve observed any other techniques or use something yourself, definitely let me know in the comments or contact me directly.
Lately, there’s been some much needed talk in the startup community about the mental health effects of the constant ups and downs that come with being involved in early stage companies. The toll can be especially taxing on founders – take a look at the notes Brad Feld received from founders after he wrote his illuminating “Founder Suicides” blog post earlier this month.
The media usually portrays famous founders as Supermen/Superwomen – which makes “regular” founders feel inferior and inadequate. This is very much related to the “crushing it” culture that has gotten so rampant. When founders are asked how things are going, it’s incredibly rare to hear an answer other than one of the many variations of “crushing it”. With more people like Brad Feld talking about mental health, I’m hoping that honesty will become more common, but maybe that’s wishful thinking.
Having been involved in a couple startups over the past few years, I’ve been through some awesome experiences and also through shitty, terrible things that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Staying mentally healthy in a rollercoaster environment like that is a huge challenge and to be honest, is something I’ve struggled with at various times in my life. Over the past few months, I’ve taken a more active approach to keeping a healthy mindset. Below are some scientifically untested techniques I’ve been using with success so far to keep my work problems in perspective:
Read Books:
I read a lot of books growing up but for some reason I pretty much stopped once I got to college. In 2014, I rediscovered my love for reading and it’s been great. Most importantly, I’ve found it’s a perfect escape for my overactive work brain. When I watch TV or a movie, my brain doesn’t have to do any work and continues drifting towards work. When I’m reading a book, my imagination gets involved and my brain stops thinking about work for awhile.
Stay Physically Healthy/Exercise/Go Outside:
When you’re already not in a great mental state and then something goes wrong physically, you’re just asking for disaster. Re-committing to my health after some issues in early 2014 has helped my mental game so much.
Going out into nature is really helpful to me as well. There’s something about being in nature that just gives perspective and makes problems feel insignificant.
Get a Hobby:
Doing something outside of work gives you two things:
I started taking acting lessons in April and it’s been great. I’ve met people who live in a completely different universe from the startup community, which is enlightening. It’s also given me insight on my own emotions and habits that I wasn’t previously aware of. I started this hobby so randomly: I took a four week Acting for Non-Actors class to improve my sales skills and ended up liking it so much that I started training more seriously. Most importantly, it lets me shut off the analytical part of my brain for awhile and do something different.
Stay Close With Your Family and Friends:
This is listed last but it’s by far the most important one for me. In most industries (including startup world), things work like this: when things are going well, you have a ton of people contacting you and it feels like you’re the most popular person ever. But when things are going badly, no one wants to talk and you feel like an outcast.
The good news is that relationships with your true friends and family don’t change when things are going great or when things are going terribly. They will be there for you. This is why it’s so important to not let your relationships die out of laziness or lack of time – something that happens too often. Friends and family are your mental safety net. When I’m having a crappy day, nothing cheers me up more than gchatting/texting/Snapchatting with friends or having a long phone conversation with my mom, dad, and brother. Invest time in your relationships and you’ll never feel alone.
Lastly, I just want to say that having struggled with some of these issues myself in the past, I’m always here if someone needs to talk or get things off their chest.