Founders often feel like hypocrites as their companies grow: they demand high performance from teams while feeling increasingly out of their depth. This tension between holding others to standards you can't meet yourself is rarely discussed but central to scaling.
Let's talk about the hardest part of entrepreneurship that nobody warns you about. In my opinion, it's hypocrisy. It's that you're going to be a hypocrite at stage. The reality is, as a leader, you are going to have to hold your people to a higher standard. You're going to have to demand that they do the work that you have hired them to do, while all along knowing that you are completely out of your depth, that you have no idea what you're doing, and that every day, if your business is growing, That means that you're just a little bit less competent than you were the day before. Now for us, we grow into these roles, we give ourselves time because it's our company. We don't want to fire ourselves, but the fact that we've got to demand that of our people, and at the same time we can't hold ourselves to quite that same standard even though we're holding ourselves to a higher standard. Yep. That's the part about entrepreneurship that nobody told me about. That's the most difficult one to deal with.
