Imposter syndrome and failure

In a world where people like Elon Musk are literally building rockets and cars that run on energy from the sun it’s easy to look at your own life as an entrepreneur and feel like a bit of a failure or be totally dismissive when people acknowledge your success or compliment you. Sure maybe you’re not changing the world at the same scale as Elon but you are no doubt having an impact on countless people’s lives through job creation and that alone is commendable.

A lot of the time growth and client acquisition really feels like luck but if you think about it carefully the only reason you’re able to take on those clients is because you’re in looking mode and you’ve got capacity to do the work, both of which require planning and execution.

I feel the majority of us have a complete misunderstanding of failure.

Failure is not really something we can be but rather something that we can do. We can fail at getting our work submitted on time or fail at a test, that might indicate we were not prepared or we were lazy or some other symptom but it doesn’t mean we as individuals are failures, as individuals we’re far more complex creatures and our lives encompass a lot more than just one task during the day or the business we’re running.

Start appreciating who you are and what you have. If you’ve screwed up and something didn’t go the way you wanted it to, rethink the situation and try again. It’s worth noting that some things are totally illogical and not worth trying in the first place, so sometimes you need to use failure as a sign and other times you need to trust your gut and push onwards.