Trust your own path.

The Illusion of Comparison in the Startup World: Why Trusting Your Unique Path is Key

It’s really hard not to play the comparison game. One way or another, we learn from an early age to self-validate, self-promote, and self-accept through comparison. We’re competitive by nature and are always trying to beat someone: ourselves, the competition, our peers, friends, colleagues, the idea of ourselves in someone else’s mind, the list goes on…

The anxiety that comes from constantly playing the comparison game rules in the startup world. If you let it, it eats you up mentally with ceaseless rhetorical conversations like: “They became a unicorn in X time, why haven’t we gotten there”? “They raised X dollars for the pre-seed round but we only raised X, what are we doing wrong?” 

But we forget that no two paths are created equal. There is no counterfactual to your story. There is no randomized control trial of your life being run in parallel by another founder or group of founders. There is literally no other founder in the world who is doing or has done what you are doing, in the same place, time, way and with the same people as you – nor will there ever be.

What worked for one startup might not work for another. Ultimately, it makes no sense to compare because it gives you the illusion of being able to copy someone else's success when in reality, all the million little details that influenced that story will never be aligned in that exact same way ever again. 

That’s why we should be careful to swallow “how-to” advice as gospel. There is no one way to do things, there is no silver bullet or magic formula. The startup road unravels as you begin to walk on it. And therein lies the magic. Every startup is an exquisitely unique chapter of overcoming which must be valued for its own sake as an epic, stand-alone story. 

Entrepreneurship doesn’t happen in a controlled lab where we get to manipulate all elements to our favor. It happens in utter darkness, where uncertainty is king. When all else is dark, trust is the only light you can find to guide the way. And that trust is not born from comparison. That trust is born from trust itself. 

I say we trust our own path, own it, and celebrate it. And if we choose to compare, let’s compare to learn, whimsically and with a grain of salt, but never to self-sabotage. You won’t exit the comparison game just by reading this. It’s still going to happen. What you can do is choose to be prepared and do something about it. The first step towards modifying something is to call it by its right name and accept it is there. 

You’re already bold enough because you’ve chosen to be a founder. Now all you need to do is cement that boldness with trust.