People won’t remember what you say, they remember how you made them feel.
Building a business is hard. There are so many challenges and most of us don’t know many other people in our local communities who can relate to the obstacles we face every day.
I’ve gotten feedback from hundreds of
@9operators listeners over the last year. I’ve learned that the podcast meets a need that no on else is addressing. But I also have more clarity than ever about our mission.
We exist to provide community and practical help to people in the trenches building companies. Creating something new and valuable in the world is ludicrously hard and lonely.
Our insecurity ratchets up the challenge. All of us, myself included, can find ourselves playing the numbers game. Trying to define our value from a number on a dashboard.
One of the biggest breakthroughs in my life has been realizing that my identity is not in the size of my company. I’m as driven and ambitious as I’ve ever been, but not because I need my company’s growth to make me feel like I have value.
There’s a reason why social media has been proven to reduce our happiness and emotional stability. It activates our worst tendencies and biggest insecurities. It encourages us to embellish the wins and hide the losses. Success porn content like that will always do numbers, but it leaves us feeling more empty and insecure after we consume it. Because even if social media presents a world where everything is always up into the right, no one’s real life works that way.
We have made almost 200 episodes of Operators. I’m confident the next 200 will be even better. Because we know the mission that we are chasing AND the pitfalls to avoid.