There are few things that make you question yourself—your intelligence, your competence, your perseverance—more than starting your own business. As an entrepreneur, there’s only one person to credit blame for how things turn out.
In 2015, I was miserable with my job. I looked for something else but my employment history favored serendipity rather than intention. Each day I grew more miserable. I was desperate for escape. Then a thought clumsily waddled across my consciousness, oblivious to the chain of events it would trigger—work for yourself. My list of options instantly became a list of one.
The clarity and ease of the decision surprises me to this day. Yet it was the obvious choice. It was the response I gave in my annual reviews when asked about my career goals (yes, really). So, why not start now? I had the experience and felt confident. Friends and family became my cheerleaders and I was the star athlete. That week, I gave in my resignation and began my two-month transition out of my role (hey—I still needed to make a little extra cash before going off life support). I secured a client two days before my end date. I was going to rock this shit.
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I’ve always been told I’m smart. Clever. Brilliant even—though I never liked that word to describe someone. It seemed…exaggerated. And temporary. But I believed it. Being smart that is. And over two decades later, I discovered that this belief likely served as my biggest disadvantage for three reasons:
- it stopped me from working my hardest,
- it heightened my fear of failure, and
- it made me unfocused.
Now, there was plenty of evidence to support why I believed I was smart. As I mentioned, I’d been told so. Everyone around me can’t be wrong, right? But fine. If you insist, we can get technical with some less subjective evidence—I’d done very well on standardized tests (as high as 97th percentile), I got into all my universities of choice, I received two academic scholarships for my MBA, I deliver when it matters, I cram work well under pressure, and I’m good at solving problems. Not bad right? That’s what I thought too.
I was quite content living in this bubble, which was surprisingly easy to do when someone else is taking care of your paycheck.
But then the universe and circumstance (and starting my own business) conspired and assaulted me with experiences and messaging that poked at my bubble.
Until it popped.
F*CK.
That hurt.
I mean I felt it coming but I didn’t think it would actually pop. Inside the bubble was where everything I believed to be true WAS true. But outside the bubble? Well, that was reality. And with the pop, reality felt a lot like self-doubt.
I had two choices. One, I could walk around covering my ears saying “nahnahnahnahnah” and ignore reality. An option I seriously considered and possibly did for some time without realizing it. Or I could learn how to live without my bubble. But to do so, I’d need to reassess everything. I mean E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G. So I said fuck it. Why not? And that’s how I ended up here.
So, where do I start? Well, there’s this thing called the scientific method. I learned it in school way back when and it popped up many times in various media I was consuming in recent months. It essentially involves collecting and examining evidence to prove or disprove a hypothesis or assumption. You see, I, like most people, disproportionately favored evidence that proved myself right—a little thing called confirmation bias. But without my bubble, I now needed to explore how my assumptions tested against reality. I thought this would be a good approach.
I figured what better way to start than to question my own mind. The core of my being.
I started by making a list of all the evidence that suggested I was NOT, indeed, smart. It was surprisingly not a difficult list to compile. I just had not considered it before:
- I’m a solid ‘B’ student
- I
lose interestgive up when things get difficult - I struggle to articulate my thoughts
- I am slow at learning new concepts
- I find it hard to remember things
- I tend to only scratch the surface
And that’s the short list. It’s not looking too good.
Ok. So now what? I explored each point further.
I’m a solid ‘B’ student
This actually only hit me when I dug up my old report cards from primary and secondary school (yes, I kept them). I never thought of myself in terms of being an ‘A’ or ‘B’ student, but going back it became painfully apparent. I certainly got A’s, but my grades fluctuated wildly from term to term and I only consistently excelled in math. It seems that for the last 20 years, I had anchored to the fact that I did well (got the equivalent of A’s) on the exams that had the biggest impact on my education path.
What was more interesting though, were the comments from my teachers:
” […] tends to daydream and to talk too much in class, and hence misses much of what goes on. With greater effort she is capable of better results.” —12 years old
“[…] works inconsistently […], and should become more organized and conscientious.” —13 years old
“[…] did not perform as well as I expected and allowed herself to be easily distracted. […]” —13 years old
“[…] needs to work a little harder in certain areas so that she can realize her full potential.” —14 years old
“Perhaps […] needs to learn more effective study habits in order to make better use of her time. An all-out concentrated effort is vital in the new year.” —16 years old
Dang. The consistency of the feedback shocked me. What the f*ck? Did I realize this at the time? Maybe it was because I hadn’t looked at it this way in over 20 years. What was even more shocking was how many of those comments still rang true today, but instead has manifested in my work.
I lose interest give up when things get difficult
Being bored is possibly the laziest—and yet most self-entitling—excuse there is. And we don’t only use it as an excuse in learning or skills development, but with people as well. What we’re really saying is this topic (or person) is not stimulating enough for us. They are not at our level. We should find other things that are more worthy of our time.
There’s a great quote by Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress:
“Everyone is interesting. If you’re ever bored in a conversation, the problem’s with you, not the other person.”
Everyone (and everything) is as interesting or as boring as we let them be. Mike Rowe tells a great story on The Tim Ferriss Show (podcast) about an audition he had for QVC (home shopping channel). The auditioners rolled a pencil across the table and instructed him to talk about it for 8 minutes and make them want it. Now for most of us, a pencil is just a piece of wood with some lead that we write with—not exactly 8 minutes’ worth of monologue. Mike’s approach, however, was to deconstruct and explore each feature of the pencil. He focused on the yellow color of the pencil and talked about why that particular color was important, how they chose that exact hue of yellow, how the paint was mixed, where the paint was mixed, and even who mixed the paint. He took a simple everyday object and made it incredibly fascinating. There’s no excuse for something to be boring—you just need to be willing to undercover what’s beneath the surface.
And yet, I used this as my go-to excuse to not push myself further—and it limited my learning and development.
Recently, I discovered there may be a reason I did this. And it had to do with my original point about being told I’m smart.
Carol Dweck is a well-known researcher and author of Mindset, her best-selling book on how our frame of thinking impacts us. Her research included a study to investigate the effects of praise on a group of fifth-graders. The study showed that praising a child for ability (e.g. “smartness”) as opposed to effort (e.g. “hard work”) resulted in decreased motivation, impaired performance, and lack of perseverance. Here is a great article that details the study.
Dweck found that from an early age, children have one of two types of mindsets that persist into their adult lives: growth or fixed. A growth mindset describes someone who attributes their results to hard work (i.e. effort, which they can control). A fixed mindset describes someone who attributes their results to innate talent (i.e. genetics, which they have no control over). Put another way, in a growth mindset, you think “the more you challenge yourself, the smarter you become“, and in the fixed mindset, you think “if you have to work hard, you don’t have ability“. For me, the scales clearly tipped to the fixed mindset side.
That’s a problem.
Lucky for me (and you), the great thing about the brain is that it can reprogram itself. Because of this, it is possible to change your mindset. I’ve learned that to do so, I need to pay closer attention to what I’m telling myself when I want to quit and force myself to persist when things seem too difficult. Easier said than done, but at least there’s something I can do about it.
I struggle to articulate my thoughts
I do believe that being able to clearly articulate your thoughts is a strong sign of intelligence. However, does it matter whether you do so verbally or with the written word? My biased answer is that it shouldn’t matter the medium you use. Especially as I’ve tended to prefer the latter since the former has been a struggle for me from a young age.
As I read through my report card comments, another theme that emerged was that I was very quiet and shy. Now, if you were to meet me today, you’d probably never think that (in fact, many people laugh when I tell them this). I was incredibly shy growing up and, even into my twenties, the thought of speaking in class caused my stomach to clench and my heart to race, and so I avoided participating as much as I could. I’m certain this hindered my academic—and personal—progress in many ways. With much effort, I have learned to become less “shy” but am still very much an introvert, and to this day I struggle with certain conversations and often find it difficult to “think on the spot”. I get flushed and upset. And quite frankly, feel stupid. I prefer to let something turn in my head, especially if it’s a topic I’m not as comfortable with. Or I deflect with humor. This continues to be a challenge for me, and something that I have to work at every day.
I am slow at learning new concepts
I recently completed the Coursera course (trying to be a better student!), Learning How To Learn, offered by Barbara Oakley of the University of California. She briefly spoke about a concept which resonated with me. The concept spoke to a subset of people who find it difficult to learn new concepts because of their limited working memory.
“If (you) […] can’t hold a lot in mind at once, you lose focus and start daydreaming in lectures and have to get to some place quiet to focus […] welcome to the clan of the creative. Having a somewhat smaller working memory means you can more easily generalize your learning into new, more creative combinations. […] You can more easily get input from other parts of your brain. These other areas, […] not only are more in tune with what’s going on around you […], but are also the source of dreams, not to mention creative ideas. You may have to work harder sometimes or even much of the time to understand what’s going on. But once you get something […] you can […] (put) it through creative places even you didn’t think you were capable of.”
I related to this because so often I have to read things multiple times before understanding them, and generally certain concepts just seem to take longer for me to grasp. I will never forget an experience I had during my MBA. I spent countless hours studying with classmates for our Economics exam as I found it such a difficult topic to fully process. I acquired a level of knowledge that I felt comfortable with going into the exam (and actually thought I knew what was going on), but it was only during the exam that light bulbs started to go off and the connections were made. It was such a strange, wonderful but also frustrating experience. But this was the norm for me—things would only solidify just before, during, or sometimes (and inconveniently) after a final exam.
I think this may also explain why I excelled at math. Because the basic underlying concepts remained the same, and we just kept building on them so I was able to grasp it a lot faster. It also explained why I was good at problem-solving, and maybe even finally provided an answer as to the extreme detail I experience in my dreams every single night. Of course, this is just one piece of evidence that I need to explore further.
I believe my limited working memory is actually also at the root of the final two points on my list:
I find it hard to remember things
I tend to only scratch the surface
Because it was so hard for me to grasp new concepts, I spent more time trying to understand them, leaving little time to spend on memorization and practice, often resulting in me cramming for exams. Well, that and my affinity to procrastinate. But that’s a topic for another post.
And this leads into the final point. Because my foundation wasn’t as solid as it should be, I didn’t have anything to build on, resulting in more superficial answers in essays and on exams rather than the deeper analysis required. Once again, comments from my teachers highlighted this, especially as I got older and expectations became higher.
“Sometimes […], she merely skims the surface, while questions demand greater analysis. She must develop her responses or else she will not improve.” —16 years old
“[…] probably needs to spend more time consolidating work done in class in order to improve the depth and focus of her answer.” —16 years old
“[…] does not learn her work thoroughly enough to produce the types of answers required at this level.” —17 years old
Where does my limited working memory leave me then? Well now that I understand it a bit better, I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing as it allows me to be more creative (supposedly), and it just reinforces my previous point on needing to change my mindset and push through when things get difficult.
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So, that brings us to today. Sixteen months since I started my journey as an entrepreneur. Sixteen months since I thought I’d rock this sh*t. Have I? To be honest, no. Not how I thought I would. I’ve experienced frustration, failure, and disappointment. And self-doubt. Most days I feel like I’ve been spun 1,000 times and then asked to walk in a straight line—completely uncoordinated and not sure which direction I’m headed. But I’ve also grown. I’ve learned so much about what drives me and what I really want.
So where does that leave us? Am I smart? Or not so smart? Well, I think Randy Pausch sums it up best:
“We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.”
I want to change how I play my hand.
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