I was on a happy hour call last night when one of the women (who is not, herself, an entrepreneur) started waxing poetic about entrepreneurship. Most of the time, I view those types of hagiographic comments about how "brave" or "courageous" entrepreneurs are as a thinly veiled sales tactic, and I was willing to do that in this case, too.
But then she said something interesting. She said that entrepreneurs are exceptional because we have absolute confidence in ourselves. That set me back a bit, because as someone who has struggled (and is still struggling) with self-esteem, I guess I never would have categorized myself as a person with absolute confidence in anything, let alone myself.
The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized it is true. This journey is really hard, and incredibly risky (this pandemic has put in sharp relief the absence of any kind of safety net for small-business owners in America), and if you don't absolutely believe that you can do whatever you are trying to do, you'd be INSANE to try it.
I'm not saying that there aren't plenty of moments of self-doubt (I have about 22 a day), but that the quiet voice inside that says, "I can do this, and I can do it better than anyone else out there" wins out at the end of the day. Honestly, if you just want to be a practitioner of whatever it is that you do, you can do that more easily, and with considerably less risk, for someone else. It's the drive to innovate, to do it better and to be the driver of the business that makes us want to start our own thing.
So, from an otherwise pretty banal happy hour, I'm taking away a new mantra.
"I have absolute confidence in myself."