Gain productivity, creativity and joy - defeat anxiety and stress It was at about 3:35 pm. I felt I was about to faint or have a panic attack. The day was not going well. Over and above, I was overly tired. It had been weeks since I had any 'win'. Therefore I needed to hustle people on the phone even if it was 4:00 pm. I was desperate. For goodness' sake, that time is around knock off time. A business pitch is the last thing they would want to hear. An earlier rejection email had heightened the panic. All these triggered my mind to think I have no hope: immediately, I time travelled to the past and the future. I saw no advantage of what my past has brought to today and I saw no light in my future. Anxiety invades our productivity and therefore our goals. All it takes is to not see progress in a day, then a week or a month. The next thing you know, you are standing at the peak of the highest anxiety hill, depressingly recalling your record of failures and doubting your future. This book goes through what to do to counter such episodes - and below are things you can do now: 1. Start the day with personal fulfilment activities 2. Work on 'business potential' tasks early on and for a fixed time 3. Escape frustration tasks 4. Use people's energies to defuse anxieties The book's theme and of which is the subtitle is 'Anxiety Defeats Creativity - Creativity Defeats Anxiety.' It means we can actively defuse our career anxieties through applying creativity. Hi, my name is Tiisetso Maloma and I've been an anxious entrepreneur for over ten years - and I've written expansively on entrepreneurship, creativity, anxiety, marketing and self improvement. Over time, our anxiety builds up; it either implodes or explodes. My anxiety has gotten me to those points several times. Entrepreneurship is one of the toughest careers in the world a person can follow. It can get severely stressing, especially when things are not going according to plan - which is probably most of the time. Entrepreneurs, rightfully so, are always focused on achieving certain goals. We pursue opportunities that we think are lucrative and this creates great expectations. We thus pine over visions, we obsess about how to reach those goals and even go as far as imagining how many units our products will sell. The funny thing is, nobody has control over reality and things don't always pan out the way we had envisioned them. Subconsciously, we are shaken when our expectations are not met and this gets us anxious and at times depressed. It should not come as a surprise that entrepreneurs are more prone to mental pains than the general population. A study entitled 'Are Entrepreneurs Touched with Fire' by Dr Michael Freeman, surveyed 242 entrepreneurs; 174 (72%) of them had mental health concerns, 118 (49%) had one or more lifelong mental health condition and 13 (5.4%) of them were suicidal - the numbers are rounded off. In contrast to entrepreneurs, the world's lifetime depression prevalence, as measured by the World Health Organization, ranges from 3% to 17%. It is a collection of anecdotes, emotions, feelings, frustrations and philosophies that will show you that, when anxiety is removed from your entrepreneurial process, creativity reaches its optimum. The Anxious Entrepreneur is for aspiring and start-up entrepreneurs. It will get you in tune with the ventures you love and introduce you to robust ways of pursuing them. I went to sleep. I played the movie 300 so it can get me to doze off. I am a comedy guy and action movies usually make me sleep. I tend to use them as sleeping pills. When I woke up, I was feeling better. I even played Donny Hathaway's rendition of 'To be Young, Gifted and Black'. It always soothes me. Always! Later on, I checked my emails and I had new business.