203 Managing Imposter Syndrome as an Accountant

Has imposter syndrome grabbed you by the 10 key? It is a part of life. It is this, like this little, little person sitting on your shoulder that perpetually holds you back. And the compounding effect of not addressing it over the course of your career. It is, is big. This one comes from a great question we got on a pod last week around how to manage imposter syndrome. Not only in like the course of, maybe you're kind of coming up through an accounting firm, but even looking at it like getting into a new niche. Who am I to work with beekeepers? Can I actually do this? Let's talk about it. I got five big old tips for you on managing imposter syndrome. Analyzing it for what it is, good and bad, because there are good aspects of it and how to overcome it to become your new fully formed, fully evolved self. Oh, I am capable. I can do anything I set my mind to. I'm sure my father loved me. Thank you to. Don't know how to say it. Agora seja. It was a comment on a video either last week or the week before. Here's the comment. For someone diving into a niche where they have little to no experience connecting with professionals, promising to give value and all that, how do you overcome imposter syndrome? You don't want to over promise and under deliver, but on the other end of the spectrum, you're offering just very generic value to all types of businesses. How do we manage this? Great question. Thank you for the question. I got all jazzed about this and I'm like, let's not do this in a Q and A. Let's do a whole video, a whole pod on imposter syndrome. Cause a big issue in many domains affects not just going out into a niche, but a whole bunch of things. I've got five tips for you. You may recall we also have an internal dialogue character, Ian, the imposter syndrome guy, we've heard from him once in the past, might just debate a couple of these points with him. Okay, first tip for managing imposter syndrome. What is ultimately like the threshold of good enough for anything. And don't frame this as an excuse for like, it being okay for you to suck at something and create problems for other people. It shouldn't be that. So in the terms of good enough, like, hopefully you have experience of some kind that is making you like actually a subject matter expert. But that's a very squishy, arbitrary answer. Like, okay, what is the right answer? I would argue these days we oftentimes set that bar Too high for ourselves. But there's also a lot of gatekeepers in the profession that, that in my opinion, don't approach this stuff in a way that's exactly conducive to getting more people excited about coming into the accounting industry. If my bar for anyone else coming into the space is they have to be as smart as me, then you never would have come into the space. Do you remember what a numpty you were when you started doing this? You might still be a numpty, but then when you zoom out and you look around at the other stuff that's happening, the fact that, I don't know, QuickBooks Live bookkeeping exists, the Bench exists, that Jackson Hewitt exists, that Liberty Tax exists, these are all services doing their best for people. Many of them have, you know, entry level folks behind them who are, who are learning and who will eventually go on and run their own firms or do really meaningful stuff for firms. Many of you may have started there, many of you may still be there. They're actually really valuable stepping stones for folks coming into our profession. But you know what? When like, the output of all that work is not perfect, right? Like, it is far from perfect. Those services are set up to be an entry point into working with a professional. They're priced very low for many people. That's all they can afford in terms of professional help. And so it is a good thing that these things exist. I don't see all the tax pros saying, hmm, give me a mountain of really simple tax work to do. That's, that's what I would, I would love to build my firm around right now. Hard to build a business around that. Cause the stuff just doesn't pay that well. But, but those people, they're getting started and they're getting experience and those services exist and whether you like them or not, they ultimately have value. So I would just be mindful of the fact that you're probably going to set that bar too high for yourself. Higher than it needs to be. But then when you zoom out and you look around and you see the quality of work that you get from other firms, Good grief. We can be our own. Like most harsh critics, there's also a lot of situations where it's like, if you're not going to help those people, who will. This comes up a lot around, like AI adoption, it came up around cloud adoption where it's like, I'm an accountant, I'm not going to jump in and advise my clients on how to pick cloud apps and integrate them and stuff. Like that it's not what an accountant does. And it's like, it isn't what an accountant does. But who does it if not you? When we look at AI, it's like, well, I'm not an. I'm not an AI expert, so I'm not going to talk about AI. Oh, good. Do you want the AI experts talking about accounting AI? You most certainly don't because they don't know anything about accounting. But that is the reality of, like, this very imperfect world that we live in. Somebody's gotta step in to be the solution. And when you're thinking about, like, building a niche, specifically going into a new domain, say you're gonna start working with beekeepers for the first time. You're finally doing it. If you don't do that, if you don't specialize, what's the flip side? The status quo. Kind of doing anything and everything for a bunch of different types of businesses. Well, that sure doesn't seem very good either, right? Like, I've got one E commerce company, I've got one retail store, I've got one gas station. The reality is, when you're doing a bunch of things for a bunch of different people, you're not doing it at a very high level. If you look at any one of those things in a vacuum, if all you did was gas stations all day long, you would be collecting the problems and the opportunities of all these other gas stations, and that would help you be a better advisor to every single one of them. But if we don't at some point draw the line and say, like, okay, I know accounting or I know tax, or I know both, I'm pretty sure I can step into this and learn it. If we don't somehow, like, make that decision to start, you're never going to be a better advisor for all of those people. Now, in some cases, maybe there's a way where you go under somebody else's wing to learn the ropes of that specific domain. Any way you can shortcut the learning process by building relationships with consultants or attorneys or the other people that work in that domain, that is great. But the reality is, whether it's perfect or not, everything one day started. And it wasn't pretty, but it still started. And that is a prerequisite to it ever being good. That's just how all things are. Now, Ian, the imposter guy, we talked with him one other episode. He's kind of like the mean older brother that. That is perpetually reminding you that you're just on the verge of Being found out for the fraud that you are. He's actually been listening in to what I've been saying thus far. Let's get his take, analyze it for what it is. There might be a couple helpful insights in there because it is a voice that we all have inside of us. Let's take it for what it is, see if there's any merit to it, and if not, we can put it behind us.

Oh, you think you're good enough? Please, you're just fooling yourself, Jason. Sure, you might have some experience, but let's be real, it's probably not nearly enough to actually be an expert. And yeah, the average stuff out there might be bad, but that doesn't mean yours is any better. You're just comparing yourself to the bottom of the barrel to make yourself feel better. And don't even get me started on your niche. You're all over the place trying to do everything instead of focusing on one thing and doing it well. Face it, you're just a fraud who's gotten lucky so far. But sooner or later, people are going to see through your act and realize you have no idea what you're doing. Quit while you're ahead before you embarrass yourself even more.

He might have taken my side on the niche thing. That's what I'm trying to avoid, is doing a little bit of everything. You're just comparing yourself to the bottom of the barrel to make yourself feel better. That's absolutely what I just did. Solid point, but I think also a fairly valid point, right? This is hard if you can get experience by, like, being under somebody else's wing who has done that thing a lot. Absolutely. Try to get experience. Just know that oftentimes you are your own worst critic. And I think we're biased to be too hard on ourselves most of the time rather than the opposite. Now, there are. We've all seen people out there who are, like, too freewheeling with this stuff, but I would argue most of us are biased the other way. The real problem here is if I take Ian's advice, I'm just never going to do anything new. So you tell me. And am I just supposed to, like, never change, then never try new things?

Oh, sure, go ahead and change and do something new. I'm sure that will totally make up for your glaring lack of talent and expertise. Not.

That was just. You're not even debating now. That was just. That was just mean.

You want to debate? Fine, let's debate. You claim you're changing and doing something new. But what evidence do you have that you're actually qualified to make these changes or try new things in your field?

That's. That's exactly the question we're trying to solve. Help me. What evidence could I get? What is the right way to do it?

The right way? There is no right way for you because you're not cut out for this. If you were, you wouldn't be questioning yourself like this. The fact that you're even asking me for evidence just proves my point. You don't have any. If you were truly qualified, you'd already have the skills, experience, and confidence to back it up without having to ask.

Boy, if that isn't imposter syndrome in a nutshell, I don't know what is. There is no right way. If I have to ask, then I'm just not cut out for this, gang. This episode is sponsored in part by Accruer. Have you seen this one yet? We did a demo day on the main channel for it a couple few months back. So Accruer, all it does is it connects to your QuickBooks online files. And whenever it sees like in an expense or an invoice or anything like that in the description, I think the phrasing is for period, like date to date, it will automatically post journal entries to accrue that revenue, that expense, that payroll journal entry. Even to accrue that across periods, it will prorate it by like the number of days in a month. Even if you go in and you change that down the road, you change that description to a different date, it will update all those accrues accrual journal entry. So if you've got clients doing contracts where that revenue gets recognized over, you know, a year or two, a number of months, and you got a whole bunch of those going on at the same time, makes that super simple. If you got clients doing prepaid expenses and you actually track them, makes that super simple as well. The payroll journal thing was actually really cool to me because it will then like figure it out based on the number of days in either period. It's all super smart. By a company called Finoptimal. They're building like a whole bunch of these little kind of tools for public accountant folks like us. To check this one out, head over to accruer.com or check out the link in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by cloud. Cloud accountant staffing. You all know I'm a big advocate of hiring offshore. One of the biggest changes I made in my firm, we transitioned a Legacy firm from 100% onshore local hiring to to 100% distributed us and then 100% distributed globally hiring and honestly is the best thing we did. It virtually alleviated all of our hiring pains, completely changed how we thought about staffing projects and the type of work that we wanted to bring on. Because you know what, the folks we hired offshore, really freaking good. A lot of misconceptions around the type of people that you hire offshore because your enterprises will oftentimes use offshore folks for like menial work. Absolutely not the case. There are tens of thousands of people working for big four accounting firms, you know, offshore outside the U.S. you can get folks that can do anything from tax to junior level stuff to super senior level stuff. But try to do that yourself, figure it all out yourself. That's going to be hard. It's going to be scary. Really good place to start. Cloud accountant staffing. They will hold your hand through that process. Their story is super simple. An accounting firm in the US hired a bunch of people in the Philippines, fell in love with them, but didn't fall in love with the fees they were having to pay to the staffing companies that were managing these employees. So they built their own solution and now they're starting to pull other accountants in. I'd encourage you. A big tipping point for me was when I was like, I'm gonna stop being opinionated on this and just try to learn. And I, so I talked with other practitioners, I talked with some of the vendors that would like help you get into offshoring. That really opened things up for me. So if you've been on the fence, I'd encourage you to at least learn about it and you start heading down that path. Consider cloud accountant staffing. That actually leads nicely into some of my other tips. Okay, let's move on to number two, asymmetry of information. The reality is you only see your own crap, you don't see other people's crap. So like we see a hundred percent of the stuff that we get wrong, but all the people around us aren't necessarily like putting the things that they're getting wrong on blast, you know. So the reality is we don't have complete information. It's probably most relevant when you're coming up through an accounting firm and you're like a write up person just getting torn to shreds by review notes every single day and how that can just be so soul sucking. The reality is everybody else makes mistakes, you're just not on the other side of that yet. When you get to be a manager, and then you're reviewing everybody else's stuff. You think that person doesn't make mistakes still? Oh, buddy, they do. There's a great. It might have been a Super bowl commercial, might have been an Intuit commercial. I don't remember what it was. I remember that his BLEEP don't stink commercial. They were, like, going around interviewing all these different people, just talking about this one person, and they were all just blown away. They're like, oh, yeah, that guy. Yeah, his BLEEP don't stink. Everybody's BLEEP stinks, okay? That's just how it is. Tip number three, the world is not a meritocracy. Oh, but if it were, this is an amazing story from Barbara Corcoran, the lady from Shark Tank. She's like, real estate queen of New York. I don't know if she just calls herself that or if there's an actual, I don't know, monarchy. Let me run you through this story she shared from early days when she was running her real estate practice. In the early days of building the Corcoran Group, I was working 24 7, doing my best to stay in business through a terrible recession. But I happened upon something that taught me I didn't have to work alone to build my brand. Here's how it happened. I was sitting at the desk one day when one of my top agents walked into my office and complained that we weren't advertising enough. Of course I wasn't advertising. I didn't have any money. But nobody was listening anyway. How are people ever going to find us if you're not even advertising? She complained. And she wasn't wrong. It was a good question. So in an attempt to please her and make another go of it, I wrote my first industry report. I simply added up our 14 sales for the year and came up with an average apartment price. That's it. I stuck a name on it, the Corcoran Report, and promptly mailed the report out to every single reporter who wrote for the New York Times in hopes that someone might be interested in my numbers. Nobody called. But to my surprise, a few days later, I flipped to the front page of the real estate section in the New York Times, and I saw the headline, study shows Co Op Prices Nearly Quintupled. And the article said, according to Barbara Corcoran, the president of the Corcoran Group, Da, da, da. They quoted my report, but I couldn't believe my eyes. And right after that, our phones never stopped ringing. It immediately put us on the map. I could hear my Salespeople answering the phones and say, oh, you've heard of us? It was still the same small company that it was the week before. But now I had the power of the press behind me and everyone treated us differently. After that, I started churning out reports on everything I could. When I read that Madonna was pregnant with her first baby, I put out a report on what Madonna would be looking for in an apartment and called it the Madonna Report. Was she looking for an apartment? I didn't know. Did Madonna call me up and give me her wish list? Of course not. I simply made a list of all the things any wealthy expecting mother would want. A bigger apartment, more bedrooms, nice views, maybe an outdoor terrace. And the press loved it. I was quoted on the news that night and in the papers as celebrity broker Barbara Corcoran. I never got Madonna as a client, but did catch the attention of Richard Gere, and I sold him an apartment. The Corcoran report taught me one of the most important lessons in business perception is reality. If you can create the image that you're bigger, fancier and greater than you are, the reality will follow. I say this a lot with accounting firms. When people don't understand the technical work that you do and they can't benchmark you from, you know, to firm A versus firm B. So, like, they're not going to take a tax return from one firm to another. And even if they had both firms prepare the return, they're not going to be able to tell you which one is better. Because even if one gets you more tax back, that doesn't mean that it's right. Same thing with a month end close. You're not going to benchmark one month and close to another. And so when they don't understand the technical aspects of what they do, they make decisions on all the other things, the client experience. Will you call them back? What was the vibe in the office? Things that are honestly pretty dumb things and have absolutely nothing to do with the technical thing they're engaging us to do. But that's all the information that they have. So it's what they make decisions based on. Now, is Barbara Corcoran's real estate group ill fated to serve the people that they began serving once they got some press? I don't know. That's a hard one to answer. But let me ask you another question today. Being one of the largest real estate groups in New York, are they still ill fitted to be able to help people? I think there you would probably say no. They have the reputation, they've done it for decades and all these different things. Right? But how would they have gotten to B if not for a couple other interesting thoughts on this story specifically? There's so many lessons in this story. Would she have landed Richard Gere if they already had work? Would she have done any of this if they already had work and were a little bit busy already and she hadn't put that report out there? What if she already had enough work to do? What if she didn't need any more clients? Would she have landed Richer Gere? No, probably not, because she wouldn't have put out the Madonna report. Is she not as good at what she does because of how she found the work or because the way that the work came in the door maybe wasn't quote unquote, merited? Gang, this world is not a meritocracy. Stuff doesn't happen because it's merited. It happens for a whole bunch of reasons, some of which are intentional, a lot of which are luck. But on the spectrum of are we leaning into opportunity or not? We just have to find the things that seem like smart bets. Things like being visible online and talking about what I do and not being an a hole to that person when you're going to disengage and having the uncomfortable conversation with, you know, the person that you look up to or the person that you bump into at a conference because not everything's in our control is not a reason to sit back. On the spectrum of people who most lean into serendipity and opportunity and visibility, like those folks who are making the time to lean into it, they're the ones who are going to find success. I shouldn't say find find success. They're the ones who are going to be exposed to greater opportunities. Now, all sorts of cool little takeaways from that story. Like, could your accounting firm issue a report, a big one for me. Am I overthinking a marketing thing that I could do? Almost certainly. You're better off trying a hundred little marketing things than putting all of your efforts into making the perfect marketing thing, which is such an accountant thing to do, right? Spending all this time, okay, I'm going to make a course. Let me clear my calendar for the next nine months to make the best gosh darn course anybody's ever made. And then when it's done, then I go to sell it or something and I'm like, wait, nobody cares. Well, because I haven't thought about marketing or distribution or any of the other things that go into it. Whether it's something that people will actually consume the fact that the first time I make a course, man, that course is probably going to be butts, but the second course I make is probably going to be better. Trouble is, I never got to the second course because I was so fixated on. On squeezing the ever loving heck out of making that first report. Just, just so talked about this bit the other day. Don't be afraid to find the side door. You don't have to go in the front door with everybody else. I'm curious what Ian's take on this story and lesson is as like a justification that not everybody's going on a linear path, marching up the ladder of capability and saying, yep, check, we now have this capability. We can responsibly do this and that.

Oh, you think Barbara Corcoran's success story applies to you?

I sure do.

She was smart, savvy, and had a knack for self promotion. You, on the other hand, are just grasping at straws, hoping that some gimmicky report will magically make people take you seriously. Even if you manage to land a client or two through some side door, it won't change the fact that you're a fraud who doesn't really know what you're doing. Sooner or later, they'll figure it out and drop you like a hot potato. Don't kid yourself. There's no shortcut to success for someone like you.

For someone like you, that's a new Were people saying that Barbara Corcoran was good at self promotion before this report? Maybe. She's definitely a creative person, but it's interesting to hear even her shock at how the headlines presented her like the the real estate group for the celebrities. You know, that is the perception of her smart, savvy and all that stuff. But was a merited. I don't know, maybe. That's actually a pretty good counter argument. If Barbara hadn't started all that and put the report out, nobody ever would be saying that she was smart and savvy and all these different things. So if I don't start, how can I ever be like her?

You think starting from scratch puts you on the same level as Barbara? Keep dreaming, buddy. She had a million times more talent and business savvy in her pinky fingers than you'll ever have.

She had like a thousand bucks in the bank. She had nothing in the beginning. Arguably, I have more than she does. He really is like a mean older brother.

Oh, wow, a whole thousand bucks. You're practically a business tycoon compared to Barbara's Humble beginnings. Let's see how far that takes you when you're trying to spin your little reports into media gold without an ounce of her charm or know how.

Okay, you know what? I'll show you. Ian, tip number four. I'm not mad. Tip number four. You're biased to focus on your failures. That's just like an evolutionary thing that I think we have to be aware of. You can have a hundred happy clients, One client complains, and you're not going to sleep tonight. Isn't that funny how that works? You don't think about. You're like. You're not staying up at night thinking about the clients at the top end of the list who are just over the moon about you. You're thinking about that one turd who is complaining about the bill when you knew that they were going to complain about the bill and you even marked it down before you sent it to them. And they're like, oh, I'm so destitute. I can't. I can't possibly pay this. And they roll up in, like, their Lexus. And you know how much money that they make. You know that they give none of it to charity, and they're convinced that they absolutely cannot give any of it to you. That's the client that we fixate on. And usually it's because, like, we've been maybe hanging on to him a little longer than we should have. That frustration actually kind of, like, builds over time, and so it gets even worse. We've. I've, like, gone on about this enough in the past, but you want to have a happy, smooth life. Do the hard things, have the hard conversations. Can't have one without the other. And you will be shocked what a quality of life improvement it is just to get rid of the worst of the worst, how just a few changes can make a huge difference. But then once you're there, it's like a new paradigm. It's like a new day where your staff is happier, you're happier, and you're like, man, where can we go from here? But oftentimes you can be trapped in the old paradigm for years because you didn't want to let that person down, or you don't want to. You don't want to lose. Lose track of your roots. You know, the very first people that you were helping anyways, human, like, the way our brains work. We are just going to fixate on the failures. That's just how we are. But there's way more to be learned in failure than there is in just Toodling along and never doing anything new step so to Sponsored in part by Live Flow. If you've ever thought about selling better paying advisory projects folks who will pay a top dollar to do a bit of coaching with them each month, maybe this is a thing that you're already doing. I think one of the most common blockers is not knowing where to start and being overwhelmed by the tools that are out there to do the job. And when a client comes to you for advising, I don't know that what they have front of mind is what kind of, what kind of wildly complex reporting package do you have to put in front of me, old friend? I think they just want to talk to you. I think that's probably what they want. That's why people use Live Flow for advising. It gives your spreadsheets brains. It connects your spreadsheet to QuickBooks. It'll auto sync data back and forth to Google sheets. Because sometimes a spreadsheet friends, sometimes it's all you need. Now Lifelow's got a whole pile of advisory templates on their site. If you haven't sold Advisory before, these things are a great place to start. Literally spin it up, connect it with Live Flow and Bob's your uncle, it's pushing that data in. You've got some really good talking points to go through with your client. And because it is a spreadsheet, it's totally customizable. You can add stuff, remove stuff, you can even move cells around and they will continue syncing. You can reference the sinking cells, the sunk cells, reference the sinkers from like another sheet. If you're building your own sort of summary report. If you're layering advisory on top of bookkeeping work kind of puts that advisory reporting on autopilot for you. Now they recently kicked off a consolidations functionality. Makes it super easy to roll up a bunch of different companies. If you work with company groups as I once did, that is a massive pain in my hiney at the end of each month or quarter when we got to roll all that stuff up together. Lifelo now makes that super easy whether those companies have matching chart of accounts or not. So if you're thinking advisory opportunities, think about LifeLow. It's a way to build all that stuff right into a spreadsheet where you're probably already pretty comfortable. Learn more about that one. Check out the link in the show notes. This episode is brought to you in part by TeamUp, helping you recruit top Filipino accountants without any ongoing monthly fees. The difference between Teamup and all the other offshoring options is that Team up helps you hire staff directly. No middleman. You work directly with your new hire in the Philippines. Hire the person, not the company. Guys, gals, gang. Here's just a few reasons to hire directly. You have access to higher level talent. Makes sense. You have complete control over team culture and training. They keep 100% of what you pay them and it's a lot more affordable for you. So you can retain your team for the long term. Team up can source accountants with experience working at US or Australian firms familiar with tools like Xero, QBO and Dex. Also recruit specialist roles, team leaders, tax specialists, administrative assistants Thought experiment what if you had an executive assistant for the first time this tax season? Just just throwing it out there. What would they do? Start at that email video I did on the main channel recently. Get help with that stanky old inbox. I digress. Team up recruits these talented folks for a flat one time fee of 4,000 US American dollars. That's it. 4K one time. Somebody at Robert Half just did a spit take. Robert Half Reference we were going to get Robert Half to sponsor this podcast. Not anymore. And they can connect you with an affordable employer of record if you need help with payroll and compliance once you hire that person. Big fan of hiring in the Philippines. You know I did a bunch of that. Check out the link in the description to learn more about Team Up. Last tip number five. This was a big one for me, honestly that I've learned really in just the last few years. Nobody is that person until they become that person. And even then it takes them a while to realize they're that person. I I can speak from experience. I don't identify as the person that I probably am. I always remember we did a podcast. It was right around 100 episodes. I was in Australia speaking at 0con. I had just gone to the Women's World cup and I'm like it all just kind of hit me at once and kind of came out in that podcast. If only people could see the fraud that I was and what a knucklehead I was like five years ago. Just a regular old dumb write up accountant that didn't know anything besides trying to impress my bosses and and win the game that I was plugged into. Which was just a very small game within a 30 person firm. And that was it. That was my reality. It was the only thing that I knew. But to think that five years out of that because I took the show onto social media and talked about what I did every day and met a ton of really smart firm runners along the way. And that basically then became my job. Just talking with folks who run successful firms every day. If I'd have known, like, how far I could come in five years, not by reinventing the wheel or figuring out these novel things myself, just from stealing from everyone else, just from like being the parrot of all of the coolest ideas that I heard and, and building my own frameworks on how those things could come together and, and where nuance matters and how oftentimes, especially people outside of space like to like, steamroll all that nuance into kind of oversimplifications, these maxims about ways to run a firm when it's like it actually depends on what you enjoy and what your clients like and stage of life that you're in, how sweaty you want to be. When it comes to running an accounting firm, I am so much still that big dumb knucklehead that's literally just doing write up and not very good at it. I was much better at running a firm than I ever was at doing write up. And, and thankfully those are two very different skills. And sometimes you have those moments and you, I'm sure, I mean, we all have these moments in our life where you look around and you're like, this is kind of wild, like, good job. But. But they're very rare moments when you're like actually pause to consider that. I had that moment night before last. I went upstairs, My daughter was at school still. My wife was sitting there playing Catan junior with my five year old. And my three year old was just had some sort of thing that he had built that he was like driving his monster trucks all over. And I came upstairs and I was like, man, could be worse. And I only allowed myself to think about that very briefly before, you know, going back to being consumed by somebody else's problems. But every now and then when you zoom out, like, you're like, wow, like, not bad. Okay. And maybe you're not in a stage of life where, where you're like that yet. But the secret is you just got to keep betting on yourself every day and make the really unsexy baby steps of like doing the right thing each day to make bets in your own favor, leaning into opportunity and visibility and all those things. Because then when you get on the other side, everybody was like, what was the turning point? How do what's different about you? And you're like, man, there was no turning point there. If you could see the late nights, if you could see the really hard things you can see all the days where I really, really didn't want to do that thing and how convincingly I faked it. That's the. It's. It's one big, long turning point. And hopefully that turning point never ends. Like, hopefully you keep evolving as a person. You don't want to stop, like, learning new things and developing and meeting, you know, cool people. Like, this statement, like, lands this notion better than anything else that I've heard. The idea that your internal identity perpetually legs two years behind your external reality. If you've ever had somebody else tell you you're that person or you're the expert in this or that, and you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. No, I'm not too late. You already are. And what we need to be mindful of is we are on the other side of that equation when we compare ourselves to everyone else. When you look at the other firms, when you consider, like, can I really go and, like, niche into beekeeping? When we look at the rest of the world, we are seeing them for, like, their external reality. But if you climb inside that person's head, they have the exact same struggle where their internal identity, what they think they're capable of, is lagging behind what they look like on the outside. And I don't think the solution is, I don't know, seeing yourself the way that everybody else sees you, because that's also not the answer. And then you just kind of get taken downstream with what everybody else says about you. The solution is accepting everybody, just making it up. Everybody's doing the best that they can. And, like, if you can approach that stuff with a level of earnestness, that can say, I am doing my best here. I might not be world class yet, but I can't get to world class until I'm continent class, then country class, state class, etc. Like, the more you can break these voices down and be aware of them for what they are in your head, literally put a name to them so that they're, like, a thing that you can assess and see the value of. Is there anything to take from this or not? But then move on then. Like, you are moving on with agency, like, you are making your own decisions, becoming who you want to be, not the person that other people want you to be, not being the person that will really stick it to that, that past firm or that person in your life who you want to prove a point to, who, spoiler alert, doesn't give a heck about you. When you can, like, tune those voices out and Just genuinely do your best in an earnest way. Show up, like, do right by people generally. Be helpful, man. That's how you do it. And consider, if you don't do it, who will do it?

Who's.

Who's better positioned to do it than you? That's the beauty of entrepreneurship, man, is the things you see when you look around, they were all willed into existence by someone. They don't exist until you make those things. That's the beauty of. Of. Of creativity, of entrepreneurship, the power to create. But that thing's never going to get off the ground if you never get out of your own head, right? What's that thing you're stuck on? Pop it in the comments if you need a little confidence. We are all navigating this. Like, even people who have, you know, arrived. We're all navigating the same thing in different ways. Just got to find a way to effectively manage it. Thanks for coming. Hanging today. I'll see you in the next one. Hey, Ian. Yeah? Up yours, imposter boy. Okay, but let's actually. Let's see what he'd actually say to that.

Your bravado can't hide your glaring inadequacies.

That's fair. That's. Yeah, they might actually be right.