Self-awareness and startup success
Self-awareness can be loosely defined as recognition and awareness of your strengths, interests, passions and skills, and how they change over time. It’s also recognizing and accepting your weaknesses and shortcomings. It’s knowing who you actually are, what you’re good at and being at peace with it.
In an age where the internet enables even niche obsessions to thrive, I believe self-awareness is key for budding entrepreneurs and creatives to create wealth and win.
Self-awareness helps you pick the right areas to focus on. It helps you pick the right markets, industries, problems and people to explore and investigate, based on strengths, skills, curiosity and specific knowledge. These are the areas where you will have a disproportionate chance of success. While others pick areas based on what’s hot or where the money is at, you’ll choose areas that you’re naturally curious about, and play while others ‘work hard’. You’ll outlast short term prospectors and find success in the long run.
Self-awareness helps you achieve product-market-founder fit. Awareness of strengths and skills will allow you to build great products that solve problems you care about. Self-awareness helps you be the right person, with the right intuition and compass, to bring a product to market, and delight your customers. Self-awareness helps you achieve product-market-founder fit.
Self-awareness helps you build the best team. Auditing your own strengths allows you to team up with and recruit others who complement and augment you. This allows you to build an organization where everyone is aligned, engaged and using their strengths in their work.
Self-awareness helps you escape competition through authenticity. In the end, deep self-awareness allows you to win by just being your true, authentic self and doing whatever it is you’re good at. You’ll escape the competition through authenticity, because no one is better at being you - than you of course.
Self-awareness helps you win by building a personal monopoly. You build self-awareness by reflecting and refining the strengths, skills, interests and specific knowledge (knowledge that can’t be taught but can be learned through experience and on the job) that are unique to you. As a result, you’ll develop a personal monopoly. Just like a business can have a monopoly over a market, you have a monopoly over 2-4 intersecting areas, in which you can offer value to others.
How to build self-awareness?
My essay on How to Find Your Strengths shares frameworks and tools that I’ve found useful in order to become more self-aware.
“Go all in on your strengths and don’t give a damn about what you suck at” - Gary Vaynerchuk
