The hardest part about being an entrepreneur is that you’re constantly forced to tease out of yourself stuff you know that you don’t know you know and don’t know why.
You have to make decisions. Many of them have pretty big stakes. Big changes to upside and downside probabilities. You can think through and analyze them easy enough. But that’s not enough.
Some things just feel right. Some things just don’t sit right. Some things are stuck in flux between the two.
Your job is to decide. But to do that well, you’ve first got to figure out what the hell you know and feel about the decision and why.
Plumbing the depths of your own gut, or subconscious, or spirit, or whatever you want to call it is no easy task. It’s hard to get down there and access the source of your inclinations. And you never know what you’ll find. You may not like it. You may try to pretend it’s not true, because your head tells you you’d have to be an idiot to feel that way about that decision.
So you have to develop rigorous self-knowledge (hard), then rigorous self-honesty about what you find (harder).
Once you go through the brutal process of figuring out what you actually want and accepting it, the decision part gets easy and fun.
But if you avoid the interior exploration and confirmation, the deciding part is torturous and only gets worse over time. Second guessing and sleeplessness are signs you haven’t yet figured out what you really want or accepted it.
This is true in all parts of life, but business forces you to confront it more quickly and frequently than most areas.