what if you're just growing?
A lot of entrepreneurs are people who have always been good at things.
That's why they go for big goals in the first place. They're highly capable. They know how to figure things out. They've been rewarded for this.
And then they start building a company.
And every single step asks them to do something they've never done before.
Fundraising.
Hiring.
Managing all the different people they hired.
Selling.
Marketing.
Building an audience.
Etc….
The thing that got you here (being good at things) is now working against you.
You can't be good at things you've never done. That tension, unaddressed, feels awful.
I've been there too.
My entire identity was built on being good at what I did for over 15 years.
Then I became an entrepreneur and spent my first year bombing sales calls for my own business….I'm literally a sales expert. And I was bad at selling my own services. And guess what…the only way out was to be honest with myself about that, find some people who were better than me at selling services, and learn from them.
You can't pick and choose the parts you want in life.
If you want to be in great shape, you can't just want the six-pack. You also have to want the early workouts, the sleep, the skipping In-N-Out, the boring meals, the discipline.
If you want to build a great company, you have to want the part where you're bad at things. The part where you really don't know if you’re doing it right. The part where your identity as "the person who figures it out" gets shattered over and over again.
You have to become a different person than the one who started the journey.
Letting go of the fear of being bad at stuff might be the single biggest shift I’ve made.
I'm not fully there yet but I'm closer all the time.
If you're in this phase (building something and feeling like you're bad at half of it) you might actually be exactly where you need to be.
Reflection for this week:
What decisions or conversations are you avoiding right now because you're afraid of being bad at them?
Responses