In this solo motivational talk, Omar Zenhom addresses the pervasive self‑doubt that entrepreneurs and creators experience. He argues that confidence is not a prerequisite for action; rather, taking action builds confidence. Zenhom outlines a four‑step framework: (1) Expect self‑doubt as a normal, recurring signal whenever you take a risk; (2) Build confidence by keeping small, daily promises to yourself—micro‑goals that create a “brick‑by‑brick” confidence wall; (3) Reframe failure as practice, learning from each loss and even intentionally seeking failure to desensitize yourself; (4) Counter doubt with immediate micro‑actions, never waiting to feel “ready.” Throughout, he illustrates each point with personal anecdotes (Bill Russell’s pre‑game anxiety, his own podcast failures, his basketball loss, the failed DIY Webinar Guide that led to Webinar Ninja) and references to biographies (Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog) and business literature (Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things). He also contrasts “playing to win” versus “playing not to lose,” emphasizing that embracing rejection and numbers‑game thinking is essential for entrepreneurial success. The talk ends with a call to subscribe, take concrete commitments, and check out a related conversation with Taki Moore.
Chapters
You don't become confident, then take action. You take action, then you become confident. Here's a little secret. Every entrepreneur feels self-doubt. It never really goes away because you take on bigger and bigger challenges in life. If you want to get confident, you need to take action. Most people don't because they're afraid to fail. But in order to succeed, you got to be willing to fail. Today, I'm going to show you how to normalize self-doubt and how to overcome it despite your fear. Let's go. I think people forget that anyone that does anything significant is scared. In the business world, self-doubt tends to hit entrepreneurs the hardest when a decision becomes public or real. Many people stay in prep mode or delay launching. They do what I call playing business. It feels like a safe option because you've never actually launched and exposed yourself, but self-doubt reoccurs every time you hit a new stage in business. Hiring for the first time, raising capital, starting a YouTube channel. It's okay to feel nervous. It's okay to be scared. Even high performers experience this. I remember a story by Bill Russell, who is one of the most popular and most winning basketball players of all time. He won 11 championships. Before every game, he still went to the bathroom and threw up out of anxiety. I'm no Bill Russell, but of course, I still feel self-doubt before every episode I record. But the truth is, is that every big failure I've had in my life resulted in a huge success. My first podcast failed, which led to this podcast, which succeeded. So how do you handle self-doubt? Let's start with step 1. Self-doubt needs to be expected. Self-doubt is not a problem that you can solve once and you're done. It shows up wherever you take a risk, wherever you enter a new stage in business, launching, hiring, raising money, trying a new platform, trying a new strategy. You can feel like a beginner all over again at every stage of business. The goal here is not to become fearless. The goal is to recognize self-doubt and choose to move forward anyway. Step 2 is to build confidence. And here's the truth. Confidence is built through action, not something that you either have or you don't. Okay? There's no way around this. You have to take action so that you can start to feel confident. One of the hacks that I highly recommend is to start by keeping small promises to yourself. Okay, so for example, I wake up in the morning, I know that I need to wake up at a certain time so I can get to the gym by 7:00 AM. If I wake up in time to have breakfast and go to the gym and I rock up to the gym at 7:00 AM and I do my workout, I tick that box in my head where it's, I plan something, I say I'm going to do something and I do it. I didn't break the promises to myself. I don't break promises to myself because I know it's a fast way to erode your confidence. But if you want to build your confidence, just create these micro goals and fulfill those goals on a daily basis. Every time you do that, you build a brick of confidence in the wall of confidence in your life. If you want to go on vacation, start saving money, start planning the vacation, start pricing it out. If you wanna finish a task, keep yourself accountable and finish it. Every time you follow through, you prove to yourself, I'm someone who does what I say I'm going to do. And every little commitment you keep is another brick in that confidence wall I'm talking about. So don't neglect the small things. The small things actually make you feel the most confident because you're getting so much repetition. You're doing it over and over and over and over. You have a track record. You have a library of evidence. That you do what you say. So when doubt hits, you can remind yourself, I do hard things, I accomplish things on a regular basis. The key to this is that you can't control outcomes, but you can control your action, the inputs you put in. So say for example, you want to launch a successful podcast. By the way, we just did an episode on this topic 2 episodes ago, so go check it out. But if you want to launch a successful podcast, you really don't have full control of being the number one podcast in in your niche, but you do have control over showing up and recording episode after episode consistently and never missing an episode. This is what I love about this show that I run, the Hunter Lambie Show. We've recorded over 2,800 episodes. In fact, this is episode 2,850. But the reality is I have 2,850 pieces of evidence that I show up consistently and I put in the work. And as long as I put in the work, the results will eventually show. We got a lot more to cover and a lot more steps to get you through. So you make sure that you are in control of your self-confidence and you keep self-doubt at bay. But before that, I want you to subscribe to the show. Why? Because we have an upcoming episode I don't want you to miss. It's titled Treat Your Business Like a Game and Get Rich. I really believe that business is like a video game. It has levels and different bosses that you have to fight, and it teaches you that not only Is winning important, but how you win and the journey you go on is really what it's all about. I'm going to show you exactly how you actually relieve yourself of the pressure of being successful by having fun in the process. Hit subscribe so you don't miss that episode. Step 3 is to reframe failure as practice. Failure is a rite of passage, not a signal to stop. Here's the thing about losing. When you lose, you reflect. I play basketball for the North Bears, the club I play for. And last Sunday we lost. It was a really close game. But when I lost, it wasn't just like all depression and sadness. The first thing I think about is what went wrong? What can I improve next time? What can our team do the next time around so that we get that win, not only against that team, but next week as well when we play another team? Sure. Success feels good and winning is amazing. But failure is where all the teaching happens. One of my favorite biographies is Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, who is the founder of Nike. And if you read this book, it's basically 20 years of failure, right? The guy's eating glass and failing and on the edge of going out of business for nearly 20 years. And the book kind of ends when he starts winning, meaning when he signs Michael Jordan for the big deal of the century. Where he wears Nike shoes on the basketball court. And you don't see anything past that. The whole book is all the stuff that came before that. And the reason why he did this is because you don't really learn anything from the wins, from the successes, from all the things that they do after when business is kind of easy for them. You really learn from the struggles, from the hardships, from how they got out of a jam. Right? And this is why I love that biography so much because it's so real and honest. If you want to get better at failure, if you're somebody that just like hates losing and you really get angry when this happens and it makes you want to quit, then here's an exercise I really recommend you do. Intentionally fail. Yeah, I'm serious. Actually try to lose at something. Do something new. Normalize failure. If you've never played pickleball, go play pickleball this weekend and see how it feels to be a beginner again. If you've never ice skated before, go ice skating. 2 years ago, somebody introduced the game of poker to me. I was horrible at it. I was really bad, but When you start something new, you can't expect to be good at it. You're going to stink, but it's OK. You're going to learn a ton and you're going to just be OK with the fact that you're not so good at it. And I recommend doing this over and over. Like, once you get good at it, like now I'm pretty good at poker and I'm winning a few tournaments, but now I got to choose something new to try so I can fail and learn and be comfortable with losing. Here's a secret about successful entrepreneurs. They're successful because they can tolerate more rejection than anyone else. That's really it. They're just willing to lose enough to learn and win. For example, before I created and launched my webinar software, Webinar Ninja, we had a product called the DIY Webinar Guide that totally flopped, that failed, that was a big waste of time and money and energy. We spent 4 months building this product that got 2 sales, which one of them was a chargeback, which is fraud. The second one was like a sympathy sale from a friend. But that failure did something incredible. It reminded me of a quote from a book called The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, and he says, Sometimes you gotta create a bad product to create a great one. That failure taught me no one wants to learn how to do webinars. They want a tool that helps them do it for them. And that's where Webinar Ninja was born as a webinar software. We launched it, we built it over 10 years, we grew it over 30,000 users, and then we got acquired. That would never happen if I didn't fall on my face, fail, and learn from that failure. Been open to learning from that failure so that I can launch the next thing more effectively and more successfully. Step 4, you got to take action. The cure to self-doubt is action. As soon as you start feeling doubt, just take any small action forward. Never wait until you feel ready because you'll never feel completely ready. Confidence comes after you take action. Whatever the next step is, take that next move, right? Publish, launch, Pitch, ask, apply, make a phone call, whatever it takes. Take that next micro step so that you are not in your head and you're in the world doing it. One of the things I learned by playing competitive sports is that in order for you to consistently win, you need to play to win and not play not to lose. There's a big difference. When you're playing to win, you're not afraid to lose. You're just going all out and whatever happens, happens. It's— you're OK with it. But when you're playing not to lose, you play tentative. You try not to make mistakes. You're thinking about how you're being perceived by other people that are watching. You're letting your fear of embarrassment and failure control you rather than your desire to win. Always play to win. Don't play to avoid losing. Okay? You can't build confidence that way. You build confidence by giving 100% and not worrying about the result. If you fail, learn from it. If you don't fail, great, move on to the next level. But you can't build confidence by staying on the sidelines. It just doesn't happen. The more you act, the more familiar you are with fear and that feeling of self-doubt, the more you're going to have power, the more you're going to be able to recognize it and say, I know this old friend, I'm used to this. I'm going to move forward despite it. Listen, self-doubt is normal. Confidence comes from keeping the promises to yourself, especially the small ones. Don't neglect this. Most people feel down on themselves because they have a history of breaking promises to themselves and to others. It's time for you to start living your promised life, right? The life that you always wanted. And the only way to do that is to keep your promises. And if for any reason you break a promise, you don't stay consistent, you don't do what you're supposed to do, you got to immediately get back on the horse. You can't just dwell on it. You can't just say, oh, I'm not consistent. Maybe I'm not cut out for this. No, immediately get back to it. If you didn't do it, do it now. Do whatever you're supposed to do. Like if I missed the gym this morning, go in the afternoon. Doesn't mean it's over for today. You can make up for it by just getting back on track as soon as possible. If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, the key is really just to be comfortable with rejection at scale, because in business, it's a numbers game. You just have to endure a certain number of nos to get a yes. And as long as you're able to endure those failures, you'll be ready for the success when it appears. Self-doubt never disappears, by the way. So the question is whether you're gonna let it stop you or not. It's gonna be there. So recognize it, say, hey, I know it's gonna come. I'm expecting it. I'm gonna move forward despite it. All right, that's enough listening to me. It's time for you to take action. Start making some commitments to yourself, some goals, and fulfill those commitments On a consistent basis. If you wanna see an example of somebody who moves forward despite their doubts and is just comfortable being themselves, go and check out my conversation with Taki Moore. He shows you how to build your own lifestyle empire using your own personal advantage. It was recently published on the podcast, so just scroll up on whatever app you're using right now. Thanks for tuning in, and I'll check you in the next episode. Ooh.
