Know Thy Value

Lately, I’ve been thinking about what’s underneath the quality of resilience and conviction - i.e. what drives someone to have a strong conviction about certain things and what makes that person persistent to see things through.

Some people might say it’s one’s vision or one’s leadership capability, but I beg to differ.

One’s present leadership and futuristic vision are certainly important. But they seem to be the external byproducts of internal conviction and resilience - not the causes, nor the fundamentals.

So what it is?

It is my belief that one needs to know one’s value before he or she can have the power of resilience. In other words, we have to know what is so unique about ourselves and what are we offer to the world.

It might sound simple but I don’t think deep down, we truly understand what we are offering to the world or what is our value to the world. We might be told by our parents and the broader society what we are and what we do. But do we really know?

I count myself as one who often gets lost and confused. Because of such confusion, we often go with the crowd - we seek others’ approval, we want social media attention and our moods are often left for others to dictate.

(“Know Thyself” in Greek)

I first saw this post when I was young - I had no idea what it really meant (maybe I still don’t). But now I can see how powerful this two-word aphorism is closer to the truth.

We often find ourselves describe people like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, and Elon Musk as visionaries. But that’s not the whole truth - nobody can "see" the future; the future is created by people making things happen and pushing things through.

Here is what these “visionaries” have in common: They know their value. They know what they are bringing to the world. Just like a camera that's perfectly zoomed-in, their understanding of themselves (to the extent of their companies) was so clear, it formed a conviction of their long-term value.

Such conviction is similar to endless fuel, powering one to keep going despite what others think.

In the startup world, there are two types of founders and investors - the ones who care deeply about the problem they solved and therefore the product (value) they bring to the world and the ones who are obsessed with vanity metrics. Sadly, the later ones are often confused and lost.

It certainly feels good to have fetched a high valuation, a positive PR press or got rounds of applause when you show up at the startup conferences. But those are not the core of a startup.

The core of a startup is to solve customers’ problems, to build something people want. The core of early-stage investing is to identify the problem (market), the solution (product & founders), and to help match the latter to the former (GTM).

By definition, neither starting a company or investing in startups involves mainstream approval - that’s why being contrarian is the norm in startup land.

However, if you ask the most successful founders, they would tell you that perhaps they are not that “contrarian” because, from their point of view, the solution to the problem is so obvious that they cannot believe the world is run in any other ways.

It is only from the outside looking in, the rest of the world would think they are strange, they are “the round pegs in the square holes” - either explicitly or inexplicitly, the society would give these misfits a tremendous amount of pressure to bend back to the status quo.

It's a clash of two mental frameworks.

No sane human being would want to bear that pressure. Well, until…

Until one truly knows the value one brings to the world. Or sometimes it's called "personal legend".

It’s a process of self-discovery.

It begins and ends with “know thy value”.

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The essay was originally published at: https://nexttrillion.substack.com/p/know-thy-value