Vision or delusion? (Part 1)

One of the hardest and loneliest battles you’ll have to fight as you work to build the life you want is maintaining unwavering self belief that you will make it despite having *nothing* to show for it over a 2-3 year period before you see “overnight” success. You’ll feel like an imposter telling others what you’re building and who you believe you’l... See more

Take, for example, the ambition to “make your venture-backed startup profitable”: to develop, market, and distribute a product or service that’s never existed before, in a form that’s valuable and accessible enough for large numbers of people to want to pay you for it, in sufficient quantity that your revenue consistently exceeds your costs.

If you... See more

If you have a good idea that excites you, that compels you to take a detour from the comfort of a normal existence along the beaten path, you will first need to navigate this minefield of misunderstanding, whether it lives within you or sits between you and those whose opinions you value and respect. Because while you can never fully know what you’

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I’m thinking about how self-doubt makes more people abandon a vision than competition or lack of funding ever will.

For the past decade, our idolatry of startups and innovation has meant the focus has been: What can we disrupt? How fast can we grow? How big can we get? How much can we raise?

Founders are taught to possess enough faith that they can build something very big very fast. This creates a pressure cooker of responsibility that distorts reality to the p... See more

Founders are taught to possess enough faith to will whatever they’re working on into existence but are rarely reminded to worship anything but themself. This creates a pressure cooker of responsibility that distorts reality to the point that they often find it hard not to confuse themselves for God — and we all know how that ends.