It makes you realise most of your confidence is borrowed and not actually yours.
Confidence borrowed from the past organisations/groups/institutions that you were/are a part of.
Family, corporations, employers, schools and institutions, etc.
Think about this: Months or years of building something new from scratch, with/for a small number of people, where every day most people outside of your startup either tell you you’re wrong, or they remain quiet and say nothing.
Hardly any “great job”s and probably rightly so while you’re pre results.
How do you keep going? Should you keep going?
The latter is a personal answer and I don’t wanna share a one-size-fits all opinion. Also my answer is too polarising and I don’t wanna mess with people’s feelings on a Wednesday. Maybe I would if it was a Friday :D jk
For the former question, the question of how to keep going, here’s what I think and have always practiced:
believe in yourself the way people who most believe in you do.
surround yourself with people who are unapologetically ambitious who don’t ask you questions like “why don’t you do something easier?”. Then listen to them, especially when they ask you questions like “why aren’t doing something about X? What’s stopping you?”
Write a manifesto on whatever it is you’re working towards m, share it on your twitter/LinkedIn/Instagram so that people who know you will know you for your ambition, to maximize the chance that someone outside of you will remind you of it on your bad days. Also to maximize feedback and therefore better aligned friendships.
don’t rush to pick a benchmark for measuring your progress. Don’t pick a benchmark at all costs. Find the most intelligent and driven and productive people that you can find in your line of work, copy their benchmark. Consider getting a coach.
If you wanna make your own benchmark, know that you must invest time in reading papers and books and interviewing people. Most personal growth and startup gurus haven’t, and if you follow them you are likely to make unintelligent decisions for work and life
i like peter thiel's quote on this: "All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition."
be super pumped
these are my learnings from running a startup and also forming tons of small peer groups for VC backed founders who'd do weekly catchups with each other to push thru the pre pmf phase of "not knowing".
if these resonate and you're a founder, you should consider signing up for LL today: https://learningloop.com
