A lot of high achievers experience imposter syndrome. The inner voice whispers in your ear and makes you doubt yourself. And this is perfectly normal. Smart, high-achieving people know how to assess things objectively, including themselves.
Imposter syndrome is the visible effect of something deeper. The baseless fear created by your mind is the root of the negative thoughts inside your head. Fear is an illusion. It is just a feeling born from your imagination. It is not real until you make it real.
The good thing is that you can control this feeling. Because it starts and ends inside your head, all you need to do is realize that fear isn’t some monster coming to eat you alive. And the best way to understand that is through experience.
This fear is especially tough for startup founders. Seeing other founders raise millions of dollars and build seemingly successful companies, or meeting VCs who seem to know all the answers, can be intimidating. You will encounter a lot of this while building your company.
This all goes away once you realize one simple fact:
Nobody knows.
Absolutely no one knows what the future will look like. Nobody knows exactly how to build a generational company. Even the successful founders and investors you meet along the way, the ones who seem to have figured it out, don’t know either.
That’s simply how the world is: we don’t know, and we figure things out as we go.
Chances are, nobody has spent more time thinking about and solving the problem you’re working on than you. So if anything, you’re the expert in your problem space.
As Steve Jobs once said, what society calls life is a straight path with walls on each side. It is fear that makes those walls. Once you step beyond them, you realize that success doesn’t come from some special talent.
That is the enlightenment. The realization: why not you.