Self-honesty and self-delusion
How often do you delude and mislead yourself?
As to what you want
What you’re good at
What you like doing
What should make you happy but doesn’t
What shouldn’t matter but does
What’s not going well
What surprisingly resonates with people
Who your friends are
Who gives you energy and who drains you
Who you can trust
What feels sustainable
What you should do less of
What makes you feel present and alive
Why you do what you do every day
Which forces have come together in creating the image you have of yourself?
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People who both matter and don’t matter to you likely hold expectations that you don’t actually want to live up to. But they may also regularly remark and compliment you on things that are very true to you and right for you and that you should double down on.
At the same time, they may also try to categorize you to make you more easily understandable, even though you don’t fundamentally belong in any of the buckets. You are more complicated.
By existing and interacting with the world you are constantly testing versions of yourself in the market.
This leads to an interesting wrestling match where you feel like on the one hand you have the real, inner you and on the other hand you have how people perceive you and what they tell you to do and reward you for.
Which means you can keep going in the direction that you believe is authentic or adapt.
(Of course there is no real real you — you have already been shaped by earlier market feedback, since the very beginning.)
In order to advance you have to iterate on the models of who you are and keep testing them as you go. Which requires a mix of conviction and open-mindedness. “Strong opinions, weakly held.”
You have to listen to what the market tells you while also keeping in mind that it may be wrong, therefore valuing your own intuition over anything else. But the frequency with which the market tells you something is very important. If you do see the same feedback coming up over and over again, even if you think it’s wrong, it’s really worth zooming in on. Because in that case one of you two — either the market or you — is deeply mistaken.
As is the case in business strategy, it is likely not a good idea to be competitor-obsessed and to compare yourself to other people too much.
You can look at what they do and see if you can learn from them but there is a high risk that you will try to distort the more authentic version of you (which already has some market fit) in order to try to become that other person which probably doesn’t overlap that much with you in strengths and interests.
Borrowing good traits and putting your own spin on them. That is the ideal.
This little piece started rather poetic and ended analytical like a psychology textbook. Despite this more dispassionate second-half way of looking at things I still think that intuition is the most powerful tool you have. It is a mix of the unconscious and the conscious, the irrational the rational, what you’ve learned from others and what you’ve learned from your own experience.
The soup of everything you think about and know to be true, both loosely and under the crisp, focused spotlight.
It is wired into you at a much more foundational level than any economic, business or strategy argument.
And so it knows best. Listen to it.
