During my senior year of college soccer, when we lost a game, I’d head to the track and run sprints. 

I justified the extra workouts as a combination of “processing time” and extra fitness to help gain the edge in the next game. Often, it worked. Not only was I in great shape, but my commitment and intensity raised the bar for our team. 

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With our second fund now online and our team refining and evolving how we make and support investments, I’ve been thinking a lot about what drives high performance— in individuals and across teams. 

But I stumbled on some surprising research that made me realize those track workouts might actually have been blowing a critical opportunity that comes from a loss. 

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In startups, like in sports, there’s little room for complacency. The stakes are high, the pace is breathtaking, and if you’re not working hard enough, a competitor will eat your lunch. 

And it’s common for athletes, like founders, to believe that self-criticism can help avoid complacency. This is reinforced by startup industry tropes, from “extreme ownership” to “hustle culture” to “growth at all costs”. 

When relentless execution and critical self-reflection are the bedrock of your success, it seems there’s no room for compassion. Being kind to yourself appears indulgent and lazy, or worse: dangerous. Any "feel good" emotions risk eroding your mojo, softening your edge, and catapulting you into complacency. And complacency - you tell yourself - would destroy your startup because the only thing that holds it together during the rough times is your toughness personified in relentless execution and critical self-reflection. 

But science says the exact opposite is true. Self-compassion is the magic that unlocks better performance.

In a recent study, psychologist Kristin Neff and her team found that there are significant performance benefits from self-compassion. She explains this counterintuitive insight on the Slight Change of Plans podcast:  

“So we did a study with several high-end NCAA sports teams, all different sports, and we taught them self-compassion over about four weeks. 

We actually didn't call it self-compassion because we knew that would stand in the way. We called it inner resilience training. We taught them how to be warm and supportive and kind to themselves when they were having trouble in their training routine, or if they lost in their sport. 

What we found is not only did it help players' mental health, it improved their performance, both self-rated and coach-rated performance.”

On the podcast, Neff, who is an expert in self-compassion, goes on to explain that being self-critical can actually prevent us from learning. 

The whole point of ‘fail fast and break things’ is to accelerate learning. But what if the startup world’s obsession with relentless execution, ownership, and growth is actually undermining that outcome?   

What if beating yourself up for a customer churning to a competitor, or berating yourself for a manufacturing delay, or obsessing relentlessly over what you did wrong in an investor pitch, is actually doing more harm than good? What if, instead, you paused to acknowledge how hard you worked, and in doing so, created space to absorb the lessons learned? Would that self-compassion-  no matter how terrifying- be worth it if it saved you from making the same mistake twice? 

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Looking back now, I see those track workouts as a misguided attempt to drive improvement. I was overwhelmed with grief, anger, and shame. I had spent a large majority of the first 20 years of my life playing competitive sports, and my identity was strongly tied to being a successful athlete. When we lost, I felt like I was a loser. And that felt unacceptable. 

So while I believe my motivation at the time was truly about self-improvement, and that extra sprints did give me a source of - however perverse - effective motivation to draw on, I can also see that the track workouts were a way to distract and punish myself. To be self-critical. 

Even worse, I can see that my lack of self-compassion likely had the opposite effect of what I intended— it prevented me from learning. 

In the same way, founders think relentless self-criticism fuels progress, when it’s actually holding them back. 

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While self-sacrifice and harsh self-criticism can drive results, they also frequently hold us back, preventing learning, chipping away at resilience, and undermining long-term success.  

Here’s to more agtech founders, farmers, and investors, and the teams they lead, unlocking the secret weapon of self-compassion in 2025 and beyond! 💜

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