Over the past year my brother David and I have experienced incredible highs (building the application or hearing we saved students from missing exams) and incredible lows (our text messaging won't work for a major carrier, the application crashed mid-day, we didn't get into to that incubator, again).

Inevitably, there will be more ups & more downs. I was interested in seeing if there was a trend, so I could learn to "stabilize" the roller-coaster ride a bit and stay focused. I've been using a really cool web application to monitor my mood called Mercuryapp. It allows you to track decisions & feelings. In my case, I was interested in my overall mood. It pings me 3 times/day and asks me how I'm feeling on a 1-5 scale. Since December 17th, my mood has been relatively stable (which is totally hypercritical to the "ups and downs" of this post). I may actually be getting better at managing my mood!

@CAgarland was kind enough to edit this post, and mentioned I need to elaborate on why I decided to do this. It's easy to get laser focused on your product & miss the big picture. I, for one am a candidate of this. All I think about is remind101, but there are other important things in life like healthy eating, friends, the gym, reading etc... I was finding that it was difficult to figure out how to balance all these things. I speculate that most 23 year olds have a full time job that starts around 8ish & ends at 5. This provides structure. For me, I have to define my own structure. Up at 7(ish) work, eat, workout etc...I'm still trying to get into a good routine but after a year it's starting to come together. So, Mercuryapp was a great tool to to track and benchmark the way I was feeling. Now, I can track what I did on the "good" days and figure out how to minimize the "bad" days. (It also let's you comment each day so if there is a specific event that occurs you can take note of it). 

Lessons learned on how to minimize the bad

• If you get denied, use it as fuel!
• Build a supportive community who believes in you & your company
• Focus on the good 
• Recognize what went wrong & learn from it
• Accept that you may very well fail 10 times before succeeding once.