flâneur

Vision or delusion? Why ambitious builders need self-trust (part 1)

genagorlin.substack.com · 1,685 words · saved by 1 readers

At some point in the startup journey, every ambitious founder wrestles with the question: am I one of the visionaries? Or am I just deluding myself? Popular wisdom tells us it’s basically a tossup. All founders must delude themselves into a false sense of certainty, we’re told; the ones we later call “visionaries” are the ones who happened to get lucky.

At some point in the startup journey, every ambitious founder wrestles with the question: am I one of the visionaries? Or am I just deluding myself? Popular wisdom tells us it’s basically a tossup. All founders must delude themselves into a false sense of certainty, we’re told; the ones we later call “visionaries” are the ones who happened to get lucky. But this popular wisdom grossly misrepresents the reality of founding. The kind of thinking that produces genuinely visionary insight—like Alexander Graham Bell’s vision for the telephone, or the Wright brothers’ vision for air travel, or…

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