#9 - 5 Lies Entrepreneurs Tell Themselves.

I rarely lie to other people.

But, oh boy, do I love to lie to myself.

I tell myself the comforting sort of lies. The kind that whisper, What you’re doing is working, don’t change a thing.

These lies cost me years of wasted effort, working on the wrong things in the wrong ways. I’m certain I’d be closer to my goals if I’d discarded those false beliefs sooner.

But why write about this? Because in expanding my circle of entrepreneurial friends, I realized something interesting:

We all tell ourselves the same lies, in the same order.

It’s like a rite of passage. All entrepreneurs need to learn the same sequence of life lessons to transform themselves into the type of people deserving of success.

I call this The Ladder of Lies, and I’m going to talk about the first 5 rungs.

If you’re on a lower rung than me, then learning about the rungs above you will hopefully save you a lot of time, heartbreak and embarrassment.

If you’re on a higher rung than me, then this article should feel like déjà-vu. Maybe you can leave a comment warning myself and others of what lays ahead.

Here are the first 5 rungs on The Ladder of Lies.

1. “These startup podcasts and YouTube videos are a great use of my time.”

You can watch them with your full attention. You can even take notes. But just because you treat it like valuable work doesn’t make it so.

It’s productivity porn.

And there’s nothing wrong with that! I’m an avid consumer myself.

My favourite productivity porn-stars are Sam and Shaan from My First Million, Chamath and the besties from All In, and Michael and Dalton from Y Combinator.

Founder-focused content is motivating. And when you’re new to startup-land, there’s a lot of great info to learn from.

But it doesn’t take long before you begin to hear the same trite lessons repackaged in every episode. At that point, your “learning” time is much better spent honing your hard skills and diving deeper in areas that interest you.

When you’re done mentally-masturbating to the idea of starting a business, you start coming up with some ideas yourself.

That’s when you graduate to lie #2…

2. “All I need is funding.”

My first business idea was Turn Signals for Bikes.

I thought this was a serious enough problem that people would pay to solve:

When I first thought of it, my pulse raced. My palms began to sweat. I rushed to tell my roommates the idea, all the while thinking, I’m gonna be rich.

Why did I react this way? Because I thought the idea, by itself, had value.

That’s how everyone feels about their first few ideas.

For most of my undergrad, I was the Director of my university’s startup incubator (it was the blind leading the blind), and several students that came through the office would refuse to tell me their idea unless I signed an NDA.

However, once you start pitching investors with nothing but a slide deck, you quickly learn that no one’s keen on listening to your idea if you haven’t done some executing on it (or worse, aren’t capable of executing on it).

So you begrudgingly accept that businesses don’t build themselves and finally begin doing some of real work. And that’s when you tell yourself lie #3…

3. “With a good enough routine, I can do it all.”

I spent a lot of time being jealous of people like Einstein, Picasso, and Michael Jordan. Really anyone that was obsessed with one thing and one thing only.

They didn’t divide their attention between a bunch of different ambitions because they had no other ambitions. All they wanted to do was focus on their one thing.

It was a comforting lie while it lasted, believing that the greats were gifted with only one goal for their lives while I was cursed with several.

But you know what brilliant, hard-working, ambitious people have more of than anyone else? Goals.

What made the greats great was their ability to say no to every superfluous goal seducing them so they could say hell yes to the most important ones.

But before you learn that lesson, you say hell yes to all of it.  

At least I did.

For a 6-month span when I was 22, I really truly thought I could write two newsletters, build a SaaS product, run basketball drills every morning, work a full-time job, lift weights 5 times a week, AND teach myself Spanish. All while maintaining a thriving social life.

When you try to squeeze it all in, you feel like you’re sprinting on a treadmill — putting in an unsustainable amount of effort and going nowhere in the process.

When your feet inevitably give out and you get rail-gunned off the backside of the treadmill, you accept that sacrifice is unavoidable.

So you end up sacrificing the wrong things by telling yourself lie #4…

4. “Relationships take too much time. I need to be single to achieve my goals.”

I ended a 4-year long relationship in November of 2021. I spent the next 4 days crying in the bathtub.

I consoled myself during that difficult time with the thought, I’m gonna to have so much time to work on now.

Do you know what actually takes up a lot of time? Dating. And reading articles titled, ‘5 Hinge Headshots Guaranteed to Get Matches.’ 

Ironically, you’re more willing to step up to the plate and swing for the fences when someone loves you no matter the score in the game.

So you give yourself permission to be with someone. But not permission to be happy. Because at some point you told yourself lie #5…

5. “Happiness is the enemy of ambition.”

Happiness has a branding problem.

Suffering on the other-hand? Very high sex-appeal.

Steve Jobs, Kobe Bryant, Tiger Woods, David Goggins. They all picked conquest over contentment at every turn and as a result, their motivational YouTube videos are absolute fire.

No one wants to read books and watch movies about chill people with lots of friends and great family lives who also accomplished incredible things.

So we grow up not knowing (or willfully ignoring) that these people exist. That there’s a timeline in the multiverse where we achieve our goals and smile while doing it.

I thought I’d lose my edge if I were happy. That if I were satisfied with the life I was living, I wouldn’t strive for more.

The opposite is true.

The happier I make myself, the more driven I am to achieve my goals. Except now, the drive comes from a desire to grow, adventure, and have fun.

And those are much more sustainable forces than fear, envy, and self-loathing.

Those are the first 5 rungs I’ve climbed on The Ladder of Lies. 

So where does that put me? Barely off the ground with no clue how much further I have to climb.

Still, I see progress.

This year I launched my first profitable SaaS product. It’s barely paying for itself, but it’s a milestone worth celebrating nonetheless.

But my goals are much greater. So, back to climbing I go.

If you’re further up The Ladder of Lies than me, help me climb faster by leaving a comment on what lays ahead.

— Rayhan