The Dangers of Foregoing Emotional Due Diligence: Aleksander Tõnnisson (Transcript)

So I made a lot of smaller and bigger decisions before buying it.

What you don’t see on this picture is my old dishwasher. I actually already had one. It looked exactly the same. It did exactly the same job.

So why did I buy a new one? Because my wife told me that our old one isn’t working. So we had this conversation one evening and she said, “Honey, have you noticed that our dishwasher isn’t working properly?” And I’m like, I’m not really sure. I’m not using it a lot.

So what happened was that I bought a new dishwasher because that seemed like an easy way out of that conversation.

So this is just a few weeks later. And I’m not an expert, but shouldn’t the dishes go inside the dishwasher?

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While you’re laughing, my wife wasn’t laughing when I told her.

So anyway, what really happened was that my wife wasn’t saying that the dishwasher isn’t working. She was saying that I’m not working and she needs my help around the kitchen.

So all I had to do at that moment was to ask her how she feels. And she would have told me that actually she misses my help around the house.

So for me, this dishwasher was like an investment, but they made the bet on the wrong horse and they lost my money, which if I would have spent on flowers, I imagine would have given me a much bigger return on investment.

And if it’s really, really ironic, because if there’s one thing I do know a lot about is about investments.

So this is me. I’m not the guy with a funny face. This is some GDPR in action. And they gave this guy an American smile because he actually is an American guy. I spent most of my professional time looking for good investment opportunities. I’ve made 70 investments. I’ve invested in 18 countries. This is what I do.

What you see on the picture is somebody who is confident, I guess, something like today.

There’s a lot of things you probably didn’t notice about that picture. One is that I’m holding onto my arm. Maybe some of you noticed. The reason for that is that on that particular day, I was on stage like today, not in front of 600 people, but 100.

But I was extremely anxious, so I was feeling very, very high anxiety and not like a normal anxiety like I feel today but disabling anxiety. So holding onto my arm actually gave me a sense of security.

But you also don’t see in this picture is somebody whose self-image is dependent on other people’s opinion. I was actually so hungry for other people’s approval, but they spent all my time and then energy in the companies I invested.

And in reality, I really felt terrible doing it because there was no energy left for myself. But they completely disregarded that feeling because I was so detached from my own feelings.

And I lost again; this time myself.

I still remember the exact day, exact hour, people I had around me; food on the table, smells in the air when I had my first panic attack. Followed by another one in 30 minutes. And that was the only starting point.

That was a downward spiral of what you call a mental breakdown or burnout. It has a lot of names.

I was diagnosed with extremely high anxiety. I started having panic attacks daily. And they ended up in the hospital having severe chest pain.

See, I used to have very, very high expectations towards all the people I was working with, all the companies I’ve invested in, and even higher for myself. I was first one in office. I was the last one who left the office. I was working on weekends. I had every single minute of my day planned.

And all of the sudden, I was in a situation where I wasn’t able to even to do the simplest tasks. Answering e-mails seemed impossible. Sitting through a Skype call, impossible.

And I actually even developed the claustrophobia. So then whenever I was in a situation where I couldn’t just stand up, I leave, I was feeling very uneasy. And I was completely disregarding my feelings, because that was what I was told, that your investments: they should be calculated. They should be rational. They should be based on hard facts.

See, investments are a lot like buying a dishwasher. Only instead of spending hours on YouTube, we put companies through what we call a due diligence. So in our case, we ask companies 176 questions. Before we even go into contract negotiations, which takes another two weeks at least.

So you could say what we’re doing is that we strip the naked before our eyes and we look at the smallest details.

The funny thing about it is there’s not a single question about feelings. How did this startup people make me feel? Did I feel a good vibe in the air between the founders? Do I like them as a person?

And believe me, there’s a fair share of dishwashers I have invested in.

So I want you to imagine startup meeting and investor. Everything’s perfect. We have beautiful presentation. They know answer to every single question. They’re dressed up; they are on time. They’re motivated, smart.

But there’s this little annoying feeling that something’s wrong in the picture. But since you cannot put your finger on it, you disregard this little annoying feeling.

And this is exactly how we invested in a company, which after we invested, went ahead and did a preorder campaign, so basically selling an idea for something which customers will get in the future.

So we raised all together 150,000 euros from hundreds of customers, took the money and run. Not only, they also trashed an apartment they were living in then. The only reason they got that apartment, because I gave them the personal recommendation.

Not only, they were also blackmailing us and going to a journalist and telling all kinds of lies once we started the legal process to get our money back or get part of it back.

And, of course, we lost.

This time not only a lot of money, but also respect from others and respect from myself.

And we’re still getting angry letters from the people who gave them money because somehow they see that we are responsible. And also we are reachable because these guys are not.

What I didn’t tell you is that the companies we invest in also go through what they call an accelerator program. So it’s a super intensive three month program where we try to squeeze in three years of college education while they have to also build up companies.

So you could say that we’re filled up with so much information, there’s no room left for feelings or emotions. And there’s roughly 2000 accelerators worldwide doing it the same way. So I can’t help to think: is what we need anther one or is there a better way?

So now I’m working together with my mentor Rain on what you can call a deep accelerator. And there’s only one of those.

So the accelerator is a one year program which is solely focused on people behind the company. So you could say that we’re focusing on the driver and not the car.

So idea is very simple, that in order to grow your business and in order to change your business, you first need to grow yourself. And one of the things using that the accelerator is how to use your feelings and intuition to make better decisions in your business life.

The first time I met my mentor and I was telling about all the business I ran he wasn’t really interested and I was like, what’s wrong with you? He was only interested in how I was feeling, why I was feeling it. And he showed me how I’m bringing my personal problems to my businesses.

So now I wanted to come back to the beginning. Do you still remember the feeling you captured? What’s really interesting things about feelings is you can use them as you use Google search every day. So what you can do is you can think now or later. Have you felt something similar before?

Because more often than not, we make decisions based on patterns in our lives. And these patterns influence our lives much, much more than we would ever expect them. And I really want to bring you an example.

So this is my first home. Do you see something extraordinary about it? No. Still not; do you see it now? Okay, so what you see there is a crack in the wall. Maybe you’ve seen a few in your life. They’re pretty usual in our climate. They live indoors. They usually live around windows and they’re pretty harmless creatures unless you start poking them with the stick.

This one here costs about a hundred euros to get rid of, for me it was almost thirty five thousand euros: my health and my relationship with my wife.

So see, this picture here is an actual evidence in a court case. And the person who bought my apartment later said that I am responsible for that crack in the wall. And I didn’t want to hear anything about it. So I ignored him.

So what he did, he went ahead and sued us for thirty five thousand euros. And he was even able to convince the court that if we would lose, we wouldn’t pay. So the court arrested our assets.

The more I fought the argument with the buyer, the worse it got to the point, where I wasn’t able to sleep at night anymore. I was having constant fights with my wife because we were not sure how to resolve that situation until I spoke with my mentor.

And he started saying, so what are you feeling? So what is your feeling saying? So you look at all the face value and all the facts, but you’re disregarding your feelings again. And once we were able to remove all the negative emotions and all the noise, what I felt was that I’m not being honest.

Why? Because according to the law in the Estonia, and it’s very similar in Latvia, I am responsible or I am accountable for such things. So if such things do appear in the real estate, which I sold, I actually have an obligation to take care of it.

And for me, this was a shocking because this is not Aleksander I know. Aleksander I know, is responsible one.

So we started digging deeper and using the same feeling, like I told you before, I was able to trace back this feeling 17 years in my life where it all started.

And I discovered a pattern, a pattern which said that whenever I was faced with a situation which might have a negative outcome for me, I tried to escape.

So this time I decided to break that pattern. And I took the full responsibility. I offered to buy back the apartment and I did. And even though it may not seem like it, this time I really felt that I won. I won my self-respect. I also accepted me for what I really am.

And I also took the responsibility for my action and inaction.

And the funny thing is that the relationship with the buyer also changed. So we were able to part with a friendly handshake. Because this is a general rule of any relationship is that if we uplift ourselves, we also uplift people around us.

And before I leave the stage, I want to come back to the very first question: how do you do today and leave you with one simple thought before going back home… those of you who are really, truly interested in people’s live lives around us, next time when you meet somebody, instead of asking them, ‘How do you do today?’ Ask them, ‘how do you feel today?’

Thank you.

Resources for Further Reading:

Guiding Difficult Decisions from “Monkey Brain” to “Wise Mind”: Lance Pendleton (Transcript)

3 Ways to Make Better Decisions – By Thinking Like a Computer: Tom Griffiths (Transcript)

Feeling Good: David Burns at TEDxReno (Full Transcript)

Emotional Mastery: The Gifted Wisdom of Unpleasant Feelings by Dr Joan Rosenberg at TEDxSantaBarbara (Transcript)

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