You’re thinking too much. Trust me, you are.
I have serious flight anxiety. I spend far too long packing, worrying that I’ll forget one or two things, even though I could probably buy whatever I need once I arrive.
The process goes something like this: putting things in the suitcase, adding more things, unpacking everything, taking half of it out, putting most of it back in, and then starting all over again.
At some point, I have to stop. Because I’m running out of time. The suitcase is still imperfect, but the flight will leave whether I’m ready or not.
I never needed a perfect suitcase to get on a plane in the first place.
Anxiety is interesting because it’s supposed to keep us safe. Our minds and bodies constantly scan for danger or potential failure modes, running an always-on monitoring service in the background.
Anxiety and excitement can feel remarkably similar in the body: a racing heart, heightened alertness, and a mind jumping ahead.
Sometimes, we can change how we experience those sensations by giving them a different name. We can choose to interpret the feeling as excitement rather than anxiety.
Maybe my whole packing ritual didn’t mean I was afraid to fly. Maybe I was just excited to get on the plane.
Many founders deal with serious anxiety. A lot of it comes from a lack of data.
When you work inside a corporation, you can often rely on the organisation to provide feedback: customer research, market reports, performance reviews, sales data. As a founder, you no longer have that structure around you. You have to create the data yourself.
That means giving yourself permission to fail. Post one video a day for 30 days. Test the landing page. Make the offer. Talk to ten customers. Find out whether something is working instead of trying to predict the answer in your head.
Getting feedback on something new is incredibly difficult because inertia is part of our nature. It’s easier to speak to someone one-on-one and ask them a question than to get them to fill out a form. It really can be that simple.
The more friction you remove between yourself and your goal, the easier it becomes to achieve it.
But one thing many people are afraid of is the truth.
Some spend their days hiding from it behind a long list of activities that have little to do with their goals. It can look like they’re doing a lot, but activity without alignment is just motion. You can be busy every day and still be moving nowhere.
The truth is often simple: you already know what needs to be done. You’re just avoiding the possibility of finding out whether it will work.
Capitalist corporations love hiring insecure overachievers. They work harder, stay later, and keep trying to prove themselves, often without asking whether the work is worth doing at all. Give them enough work, and they may spend years trying to prove that they deserve to be there.
Many women I know struggle with imposter syndrome. They often worry about whether they’re good enough, even when they have every reason to believe they are.
How could they not?
It can be a horrifying experience to be a woman. From a young age, you’re targeted by advertisements telling you that you need another whitening cream to look beautiful enough, another product to keep you looking young, and another fix for a body that was never broken.
Perfectionism kills startups in the same way it kills the possibility of enjoying work that’s actually aligned with us. We spend so much time trying to make something perfect that we never give it the chance to become real.
Stop trying to pack the perfect suitcase. Stop trying to make the perfect thing, say the perfect thing, or become the perfect person.
The plane is leaving anyway.
Try to be good enough.
世界是巨大的草台班子
The world is a huge makeshift theatre troupe.