Certainty Isn’t Competence

Entrepreneurship isn’t about knowing.

It’s about knowing you don’t know, being comfortable with that, and trusting yourself to figure it the fuck out.

That’s a completely different skill.

When you’re inexperienced, you think the goal is to eventually know enough that you become certain.

Then you spend enough years actually building businesses and realize certainty was never available in the first place.

There are too many variables.

Customers change.

Markets change.

People behave irrationally.

Competitors surprise you.

What worked yesterday stops working tomorrow.

Experience doesn’t eliminate uncertainty.

It teaches you how to operate inside of it.

That’s why I’ve noticed you can often estimate someone’s level of entrepreneurial experience by how certain they sound.

The inexperienced guy tells you exactly what will happen.

“This will definitely work.”

“That will never work.”

“This is the only way to do it.”

He speaks in absolutes because he hasn’t been punched in the fucking mouth enough times by reality to understand how much he doesn’t know.

And this is where these people become dangerous.

Because real entrepreneurs are already uncertain.

We’re making decisions with incomplete information every fucking day.

We’re questioning ourselves.

We’re trying to figure out whether we’re seeing something correctly.

Then we open our phones and see somebody who has never built anything meaningful speaking with absolute certainty about exactly how business works.

And if you don’t understand what you’re looking at, you start thinking:

Fuck. Maybe I’m the one who doesn’t know what I’m doing.

That’s the trap.

You mistake their certainty for competence and your uncertainty for incompetence.

When very often, it’s the exact opposite.

The experienced entrepreneur has lived through enough unexpected outcomes to respect what he doesn’t know.

He’ll tell you:

“I think this is the right move.”

“Based on what we know, this makes the most sense.”

“If we’re wrong, we’ll adjust.”

That isn’t weakness.

That’s competence.

There’s a massive difference between conviction and certainty.

Conviction means I’m willing to make the best decision I can with the information I have and take responsibility for whatever happens next.

Certainty is often just ignorance that hasn’t been corrected by experience yet.

So stop letting people who have never carried the weight of building something make you question yourself because they sound more certain than you feel.

You’re supposed to have questions.

You’re supposed to encounter problems you don’t know how to solve.

You’re supposed to wonder whether you’re making the right move.

That’s entrepreneurship.

The skill was never knowing everything.

The skill is being able to say:

I don’t know.

…but I’ll fucking figure it out.

#100to0