You know that niggling voice in your head? The one that tells you that you are not smart or experienced enough? The one which asks you, “Who are you to do this?” The one which inserts doubt into every ounce of confidence you have?

We all have them.

Every entrepreneur I know, myself included, will tell you (if they are honest enough with themselves) that they are riddled by self-doubt. Once upon a time, this mechanism was useful, as it prevented us from being eaten by a saber tooth tiger or trampled upon by a woolen mammoth. Today, not so much.

Every entrepreneur I know, myself included, is riddled by self-doubt. Tweet This Quote

The hard part is that you will not get rid of those voices. But, you can put them into their place and quieten them. Simply ask yourself the question: Is it true?

Typically, the voices are white lies. They are not factually true, but rather a feeling or a hypothesis. “I haven’t studied machine learning, thus I am not good at it.” Maybe. But maybe not. It surely is not universally true.

The hard part is that you will not get rid of those voices in your head, but you can put them in their place. Tweet This Quote

Once you established that it is not true (at least not true with a capital “T”), turn the sentence on its head and create a positive: “Because I haven’t studied machine learning, I have the ability to tackle problems from an unconventional angle.”

Now, feed this new narrative to yourself. And free your ego from your demons. You’re fine. Always were, always will be.


This post originally posted on Pascal’s blog.

Pascal Finette

Author Pascal Finette

Pascal is the Managing Director of Singularity University's Startup Lab. He is also an entrepreneur, coach, and speaker who has worked in Internet powerhouses, such as eBay, Mozilla, and Google, and Venture Capital—starting both a VC firm and accelerator program.

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