Working in Startupland can be incredibly rewarding but also bring you to a breaking point. The fear of not fulfilling the expectations your team or co-workers have of you? The feeling of not knowing what on earth you are doing here, although your LinkedIn network celebrates you for "building the next big thing"?
"I do not know a single successful person who was not struggling with mental health." This is what serial entrepreneur Adrian Locher told us in our conversation with him. Adrian started his first company at 14. By the time he was running his career at his peak, he was logging 120 flights a year, building two companies in two time zones, and pushing harder because that was the only gear he knew. Until everything collapsed: his marriage ended, he missed the birth of his second child, and he hit what he describes as the lowest point of his life.
But Adrian rebuilt. Not by grinding harder, but by going inward. He got a therapist. He built a framework. And he fundamentally changed how he operates.
The core of that framework is dead simple. He calls it The Three Buckets.
How the Three Buckets protect your mental peace
Adrian learned this concept in therapy, and it stuck because it doesn't require a self-help book to understand.
Your life has three buckets:
Business: your company, your work, the thing that probably consumes 80-100% of your waking hours right now.
Family & Relationships: partner, kids, friends, the people who matter but keep getting rescheduled.
Self: your physical health, mental health, the things that actually recharge you. Not Instagram. Not "I'll sleep when I'm dead." The stuff that makes you a functioning human.
The insight isn't that these three areas exist. You know that. The insight is this:
If you're only filling one bucket, the other two don't wait patiently. They drain.
Most founders reading this already know which bucket they're neglecting. The question is whether you'll do anything about it before you have your own version of Adrian's story.
Ready to do your own energy?
What follows is an exercise. It will take a level of honesty that might be uncomfortable. No scoring system, no gamification, just questions that force you to look at what's actually happening in your life right now.
If you're the kind of person who reads frameworks and thinks "interesting" but never applies them, this is where you stop. If you're ready to be honest with yourself, keep going.
